Sylvia Plath Would be the Queen of Passive Aggressive Posts
“Sylvia Plath. I’m imagining lots of those ambiguous ‘I never should have trusted you’ statuses.” Sylvia Plath (October 1932 – February 1963) was an American writer whose best-known works, including the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction that has resonated with many readers since the mid-20th century. Her decidedly moody tones are, no doubt, what led this person to speculate about her social media persona now. Her life’s biggest relationship did not end well and led her to struggle quite a bit with mental health. This relationship failure led to her greatest work.
Plath first met poet, Ted Hughes, on February 25, 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England. They wrote poems back and forth to each other and romance bloomed naturally. The couple married on June 16, 1956, and honeymooned in Benidorm, Spain. The following year, Plath and Hughes moved to Massachusetts, where she taught at her alma mater, Smith College. Long story short, all was not well in the marriage. After the loss of a daughter, and the birth of a son, Plath’s mental health had suffered considerably. Her life further went awry when her husband began an affair with a mutual friend. After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with one young woman’s mental breakdown. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. She would soon after end her own life in 1963.