Sylvia Plath was an amazing woman and after watching the film 'Sylvia', my admiration of her just grew. I was appalled at the way Ted Hughes treated her: affairs, infidelity and broken promises. She needed love and security.
I was bewitched by the film 'Sylvia' and saw it twice in one day. Partly because I love Gwyneth Paltrow but mainly because it's an amazing film portraying an even more amazing woman.
Plath was clearly always mentally unstable, from the time she met Hughes to her death in 1963. She told him many a times of her failed suicide attempts: an overdose, attempted drowning. When she discovers Hughes is repeatedly betraying her trust and cheating on her she becomes more and more ill until she cannot cope anymore and on February 11th 1963 she committed suicide by putting her head in the oven. In her life she wrote some outstanding poems, such as Daddy. She also wrote her only novel The Bell Jar. The book centres around Esther Greenwood, a troubled young lady trying to find her place in the world.
The novel was semi-autobiographical and portrayed many events which also paralleled Plath's life.
Sylvia Plath was unwell and sadly did not get the help she needed and deserved. Her intense poetry on the theme of death conveys her deteriorating mental stability and suicidal ideation.
I don't know what is was about Plath's novel that captured me, left me pining for more of her works. I read The Bell Jar in a matter of days and it stayed with me long after I finished it. I may re-read it, especially after reading an article on one woman's permanent adoration of the novel.
Plath had two children. Her daughter, Frieda Hughes is alive today and identifies as a writer and poet, her son, Nicholas Highes was a fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology, however he hanged himself in 2009 after suffering with depression.
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