She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963.

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Sylvia's eighth birthday,[8] of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes.

[8] Plath commented in "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth".

[15] She was furious at not being at a meeting that Mademoiselle editor Cyrilly Abels had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a writer whose work she loved, according to one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself".

[5] Following ECT for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953,[18] by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.

[20] According to Plath's biographer Andrew Wilson, Olive Higgins Prouty "would take Dr Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide attempt".

In January 1955, she submitted her thesis The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B., summa cum laude.

In a 1961 BBC interview now held by the British Library Sound Archive,[25] Plath describes how she met Hughes: I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him.

Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evenings sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).

[5][28] The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence.

[32] In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; immediately afterwards, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton.

While for most of the time she had been able to continue working, her depression had worsened and become severe, "marked by constant agitation, suicidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life."

[38] Hughes claimed in a hand-written note to the literary critic Keith Sagar, discovered in 2001, that the anti-depressants prescribed were a "key factor" in Plath's suicide.

Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St. Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her:[50] "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted."

Biographers have attributed the source of the quote either to the Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita[50] or to the 16th-century Buddhist novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en.

[37][60] Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown...

[72] Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips.

[37] In 2006, Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled "Ennui".

[78][79] Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor.

[81] More than half of the new volume contained newly released material;[80] the American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event".

Her book Monster (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains".

Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls.

[57] Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21.

Her September 1961 poem "Wuthering Heights" takes its title from the Emily Brontë novel, but its content and style is Plath's own particular vision of the Pennine landscape.

[44] The critic at Time said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide.

Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified.

[112] Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: I have never before learned anything from a poetic reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge.

Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "The Applicant", "Fever 103°"—were beautifully read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced.

Elizabeth Sigmund, who was friends with both Plath and Hughes, criticized the movie for depicting Sylvia as "a permanent depressive and a possessive person", but she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy".

[115] In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother", first published in Tatler:[116] Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children