Sylvia Plath Trivia
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45 free Sylvia Plath trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Sylvia Plath published one poetry collection and one novel in her lifetime, and yet six decades after her death at 30 she is one of the most read poets in English. This quiz follows the whole story: the Boston childhood and the entomologist father who died when she was eight, the prizes at Smith College, the guest editorship at Mademoiselle that became The Bell Jar, the Fulbright year at Cambridge, the whirlwind marriage to Ted Hughes, the beekeeping in Devon and the astonishing burst of poems in the last months of her life. It also covers what happened afterwards: how Hughes rearranged Ariel, the pen name on The Bell Jar, the posthumous Pulitzer, the destroyed journal, Birthday Letters, the 2004 restored edition, the biopic and the gravestone in Heptonstall. Questions run from easy (which novel she wrote) to expert (the working titles of The Bell Jar). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Plath, her books, her poems and the people around her, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our poetry, Ted Hughes and American literature quizzes next.
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Q 01Besides biology, which language did Sylvia Plath's father Otto teach at Boston University?
German
German: Aurelia met Otto when he was her professor there, and they married in January 1932, the year Sylvia was born.
Q 02Plath's father Otto, a Boston University biology professor, wrote a 1934 book about which insects?
Bumblebees
Bumblebees were Otto's specialty, and decades later Sylvia took up beekeeping herself and wrote a sequence of bee poems.
Q 03Otto Plath died in 1940 of complications from what?
Untreated diabetes
Untreated diabetes killed him in 1940, when Sylvia was eight, and his death haunts her most infamous poem, 'Daddy'.
Q 04Which private women's college in Massachusetts did Plath attend from 1950?
Smith
Smith awarded her a summa cum laude degree in 1955, two years after a breakdown and suicide attempt had interrupted her studies.
Q 05After her third year of college Plath spent a month in New York as a guest editor at which magazine?
Mademoiselle
Mademoiselle gave her the New York month she later turned into The Bell Jar, whose heroine hurls her clothes off the hotel roof.
Q 06Which novelist paid for Plath's college scholarship and her 1953 stay at McLean Hospital?
Olive Higgins Prouty
Olive Higgins Prouty, author of Now, Voyager, had been treated for a breakdown herself, and her psychiatrist had urged her to take her writing seriously.
Q 07Plath's undergraduate thesis studied 'the double' in two novels by which author?
Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky's doubles later shaped The Bell Jar, critics argue, and its dreamlike opening echoes the first scene of his novel The Double.
Q 08Plath went to Cambridge University on which scholarship?
Fulbright
Fulbright funding took her to Cambridge in 1955, and within months she met the English poet Ted Hughes at a party.
Q 09At which Cambridge college was Plath a student?
Newnham
She studied there with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard.
Q 10Plath met Ted Hughes in February 1956 at a party launching which poetry magazine?
St. Botolph's Review
She had read his poems in the magazine and wanted to meet him; they married four months later.
Q 11Plath and Hughes married on 16 June 1956, a date chosen in honour of what?
Bloomsday
Bloomsday was their choice, and after the wedding they spent most of their honeymoon in Benidorm, on Spain's Costa Blanca.
Q 12Back in the US in 1959, Plath attended a writing seminar at Boston University taught by which poet?
Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell's class pushed her toward writing from raw personal experience, the style that critics soon labelled confessional poetry.
Q 13Which poet in Plath's 1959 Boston University poetry seminar later won a Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die?
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton had met Plath in that seminar, and after Plath's suicide she mourned her in the poem 'Sylvia's Death'.
Q 21In December 1962 Plath rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, once the boyhood home of which poet?
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats's blue plaque over the door drew her to the house, and she took living there as a good omen.
Q 22Under what pen name was The Bell Jar first published in January 1963?
Victoria Lucas
Victoria Lucas spared her mother and the real people behind the characters, since the novel drew so closely on her own life.
Q 23Who is the narrator and heroine of The Bell Jar?
Esther Greenwood
Esther Greenwood feels trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath, the image of depression that gives the novel its title.
Q 14In a 1959 review, M. L. Rosenthal first called which book of poems 'confessional'?
Life Studies
Life Studies was, Plath said in a 1962 interview, a 'breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience' that excited her own late work.
Q 15At which artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, did Plath and Hughes stay in autumn 1959?
Yaddo
Yaddo is where she wrote a seven-part sequence of poems that Hughes, in earlier writings, seemed to see as the true start of her best work.
Q 16Plath's first collection, and the only poetry book published in her lifetime, was called what?
The Colossus
The Colossus stayed her only poetry book in print while she lived, and Ariel, the book her fame rests on, appeared two years after her death.
Q 17What was the name of the son Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had in January 1962?
Nicholas
Nicholas Hughes became a fisheries biologist in Alaska, a love of fish and fishing he shared with his father, Ted.
Q 18In 1961 Plath and Hughes moved to Court Green, a house in North Tawton in which English county?
Devon
Devon is where the couple hosted Assia and David Wevill for a weekend in May 1962, the visit on which Hughes fell for Assia.
Q 19Which poetry critic and friend of Plath said in 2000, 'I failed her', about her final weeks?
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez had championed her last poems in The Observer, yet he admitted he never saw how depressed she was when she came to him for help.
Q 20How did Assia Wevill, for whom Hughes left Plath in 1962, first enter the couple's lives?
She rented their old flat
She rented their old flat with her husband, and in 1965 she and Hughes had a daughter, Shura.
Q 24Why was The Bell Jar kept from American readers until 1971?
Her mother opposed it
Her mother opposed it, and Harper & Row, which finally published it there in 1971, had once turned the manuscript down.
Q 25In which city did Sylvia Plath die, at the age of 30?
London
London is where she died less than a month after The Bell Jar was published there under a pen name.
Q 26Sylvia Plath is buried in the village of Heptonstall, in which English county?
West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire was Ted Hughes's home ground, and her headstone there has repeatedly had the name 'Hughes' hacked off it.
Q 27Which British literary prize did Ted Hughes win in both 1998 and 1999?
The Whitbread Book of the Year
The Whitbread Book of the Year went to his Tales from Ovid and then to his poems about Plath, the second awarded after his death.
Q 28What did Ted Hughes do to Plath's Ariel manuscript as its editor?
He reordered and changed it
He reordered and changed it, leaving out poems she had chosen, until a 2004 edition restored her own order and selection.
Q 29Who wrote the foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition in 2004?
Frieda Hughes
Frieda Hughes, a poet and painter, had also refused the 2003 film Sylvia any use of her mother's poems.
Q 30Plath described 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' as belonging to which unlikely category?
Light verse
Light verse was Plath's own label, which critics read through W. H. Auden's view that light verse can be serious.