Sylvia Plath

Within this seminar, Plath, Lowell and Sexton, whilst starting with very different writing styles, each gravitated towards a new style of poetry dubbed confessional for its use of personal experience and its tendency to use a direct form of address.

The Bell Jar was published in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

She died by suicide at age 30 in London on February 11, 1963.

For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982

She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and her works include The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide.

Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas

The protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression.

Ted Hughes, Plath's widower and the editor of Ariel, made substantial changes to her intended plan for the collection by changing her ordering of the poems, dropping some pieces, and adding others.