In The Bell Jar, originally published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, Sylvia Plath
was recording much of her personal experience. Plath was born on October 27, 1932. Her
brother, Warren Joseph Plath, was born in 1935. When Plath was five years old, her family
moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, where she was a model student. However, in 1940, her
father Otto Plath died of pneumonia and complications from diabetes. Plath won many awards,
both local and national, for her writing in the years after her father's death. During her teens, she
met a classmate named Richard Willard. Later, she dated his older brother, Buddy. In 1950,
Sylvia Plath entered Smith College in Nothampton, Massachusetts. While she was there, Buddy
When Sylvia was twenty years old, she won the Mademoiselle fiction contest, and during
the summer of 1953, she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle. Later that summer, Plath attempted
suicide with sleeping pills. She was found and taken to Newton-Wellesley Hospital. For the
remaining part of that year, she resided at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and was
treated with insulin and electro-shock therapy. In The Bell Jar, Plath does not write about her life
Plath returned to Smith and graduated in 1955. She moved to London, where she met
Ted Hughes. She married him, and they returned to the U.S. in 1957. In the next two years, Ms.
Plath held a hospital clerical position after she quit her instructor job at Smith. She did this in
order to devote more time to writing. The last few years of Sylvia Plath's life were very busy.
She moved back to England with her husband and had a girl in the spring of 1960. The following
year was difficult because she had both a miscarriage and an appendectomy. In early 1962, she
gave birth to a baby boy, but a few months later, her husband left her. She then moved to London
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