Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems.
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation, and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He served as Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical, with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef because the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath died by suicide a month after its first UK publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, in accordance with the wishes of both Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
Sylvia is a 2003 British biographical drama film directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, and Michael Gambon. It tells a story based on the real-life romance between prominent poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The film begins with their meeting at Cambridge in 1956 and ends with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963.
Assia Esther Wevill was a German woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Palestine, then later the United Kingdom, where she had a relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes. She killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura using a gas oven, similar to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath's suicide six years earlier.
Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and "explosive" marriage.
Erica Wagner is an American author and critic, living in London, England. She is former literary editor of The Times.
Aurelia Frances Plath was the wife of Otto Emil Plath, the mother of the American poet Sylvia Plath, and her brother Warren, and the grandmother of Frieda Rebecca Hughes and Nicholas Farrar Hughes.
Jacqueline Rose, FBA is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Olive Higgins Prouty was an American novelist and poet, best known for her 1922 novel Stella Dallas and her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in her 1941 novel Now, Voyager.
Nicholas Farrar Hughes was an English-American fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology. Hughes was the son of the American poet Sylvia Plath and English poet Ted Hughes, and the younger brother of artist and poet Frieda Hughes. He and his sister were well known to the public through the media when he was a small child, especially after the well-publicized suicide of his mother. Hughes held dual British/American citizenship.
The following bibliography of Sylvia Plath is a list of articles, poems, and books written by the American confessional poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). Plath was primarily known for her poetry but has earned her greatest reputation for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously weeks before her death.
Letters Home may refer to:
Aurelia is a feminine given name from the Latin family name Aurelius, which was derived from aureus meaning "golden". The name began from minor early saints but was given as a name due to its meaning, and not from where it originated. Aurelia may refer to:
The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, first published by Heinemann, in 1960. It is the only volume of poetry by Plath that was published before her death in 1963.
Otto Emil Plath was a German American author, a professor of biology and German at Boston University, and an entomologist, with a specific expertise on bees. He was the father of American poet Sylvia Plath, Warren Plath, and the husband of Aurelia Plath. He wrote the 1934 book, Bumblebees and Their Ways. He is notable for being the probable subject of one of his daughter's most well-known poems, Daddy.
Crossing the Water is a 1971 posthumous collection of poetry by Sylvia Plath that was prepared for publication by Ted Hughes. These are transitional poems that were written along with the poems that appear in her poetic opus, Ariel. The collection was published in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber (1975) and in the United States by Harper & Row (1976).
Winter Trees is a 1971 posthumous collection of poetry by Sylvia Plath, published by her husband Ted Hughes. Along with Crossing the Water it provides the remainder of the poems that Plath had written during her state of elevated creativity prior to her suicide.
Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, also known by her married name Ruth Beuscher, was an American psychiatrist, theologian, and Episcopal priest. Best known for being the psychiatrist of Sylvia Plath, she corresponded with her since they met at McLean Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts following Plath's breakdown in 1953. Though Plath destroyed most of their letters, fourteen from Plath to Barnhouse remain.
"Sylvia’s Death" is a poem by American writer and poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974) written in 1963. "Sylvia's Death" was first seen within Sexton's short memoir “The Barfly Ought to Sing” for TriQuarterly magazine. The poem was also then included in her 1966 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems "Live or Die". The poem is highly confessional in tone, focusing on the suicide of friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1963, as well as Sexton’s own yearning for death. Due to the fact that Sexton wrote the poem only days after Plath’s passing within February of 1963, "Sylvia’s Death" is often seen as an elegy for Plath. The poem is also thought to have underlying themes of female suppression, suffering, and death due to the confines of domesticity subsequent of the patriarchy.
