Sylvia Plath - Heptonstall, England - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”
- Sylvia Plath, from the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’

Born into an academic family (her father was a college professor, and her mother was a graduate student) Sylvia Plath exceled in high school and college, eventually attending Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. With a penchant for writing, Plath began publishing short stories in various publications while still in college.

In 1956, while at Cambridge, Sylvia Plath met English poet Ted Hughes. The two were married and shortly thereafter, moved to the United States. By 1960, they had moved back to England where their two children were born and where her first collection of poems (‘Colossus’) was published. Plath’s novel ‘The Bell Jar’ was published early in 1963 and a month later, she was dead.

Most agree that Sylvia Plath suffered her entire life with some kind of mental illness, either clinical depression or bipolar disorder. This was compounded by problems at home when growing up (her father died when she was only eight years old) and her husband’s physical abuse and infidelity. She made an attempt on her life in 1953 and was subsequently treated for mental illness - ‘The Bell Jar’ is largely an autobiographical account of this treatment. She made another attempt on her life in 1962 when her marriage was falling apart and was finally successful in early 1963 when she was found dead in her apartment with her head in the oven.

Most of Sylvia Plath’s poems and journals were published posthumously, in fact her Pulitzer Prize for poetry was awarded posthumously, the first so awarded. Many of her fans blamed her death on her husband, Ted Hughes, so much so that her gravesite was vandalized by attempts to remove the name ‘Hughes’ from the headstone. That headstone has been replaced but there have been subsequent attempts to obliterate the name ‘Hughes.’ When I visited the grave, the name ‘Hughes’ had been mostly erased.
(Sources: wikipedia.org, poets.org.)

Description: Sylvia Plath is buried in the churchyard of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in the small village of Heptonstall. Date of birth: 10/27/1932 Date of death: 02/11/1963 Area of notoriety: Literature Marker Type: Headstone Setting: Outdoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: none Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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