11 February

Sylvia Plath commits suicide, in the coldest winter in England for fifteen years

1963 Only those (like the present authors) who lived through the winters of 1947 and 1963 can know not how cold they were (much less so, in terms of degrees, than winters in Plath’s native Boston) but how wretchedly ill-equipped British heating, plumbing and transport was for the unseasonably freezing weather. It was a bad time.

The weather doubtless exacerbated Plath’s suicidal depression; but there were other factors. She had long suffered self-destructive impulses. She attempted suicide at least twice in college and her first (and only) published novel, The Bell Jar (by ‘Victoria Lucas’, published a month before her death), replays that period of her life. In the months leading up to her death when she wrote her most famous poems, a number of them revolved around the theme of suicide. Notably ‘Lady Lazarus’, with its laconically morbid opening lines: ‘Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.’ Her physician had been trying to find her a place in a psychiatric unit for weeks. But the NHS was no more efficient that winter than British central heating.

Her tempestuous marriage to the poet Ted Hughes was the trigger for her suicide. He had abandoned her, and their two children, for Assia Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill. Plath had moved to a flat in 23 Fitzroy Road, a house where W.B. Yeats had once lived.

Early in the morning of 11 February, Plath put milk and bread in the children’s room, broke their window (to let in air), went down to the kitchen, sealed the doors with wet towels, turned on the gas in the oven and waited to die. Her friend and active promoter of her poetry, Al Alvarez, who had seen her shortly before, speculates that it may have been initially at least a half-hearted suicide attempt – a cry for help. If so, it failed. Her dead body was found some hours later.

She was buried five days later in the Hughes family cemetery at Heptonstall. The headstone, which identifies her as ‘Sylvia Hughes’, has been regularly vandalised. Plath’s death, it is not coincidental to note, occurred in the period that the National Organization of Women was formed, 28 June 1966. Her suicide has, for many women, taken on symbolic meaning.

After Plath’s death, Hughes lived with Assia Wevill. She committed suicide – in exactly the same way as Plath – on 23 March 1969, killing their child as well. Hughes remarried in 1970, and died of cancer in 1998. On 16 March 2009, Hughes and Plath’s son, Nicholas, killed himself.