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The High Priestess of Suffering - Page 2

© Megan Drummond

After completing her studies at Cambridge, Sylvia was offered a teaching position at Smith. She jumped at the chance to share her love of the English language with the students. Though the college was pleased with her performance, Sylvia was plagued by self-doubts and marriage woes. When the college offered to renew her contract, she refused, citing doubts about her teaching abilities. Sylvia took a less draining position in the psychiatric ward at Mass. General. She worked in the mornings, secretly visited a therapist in the afternoons and wrote at night.

Sylvia and Ted moved back to England in 1959. Her first book was published in England and, for the first time in her life, Sylvia seemed happy and content. She gave birth to her first child in April of 1960, but miscarried a child in February of 1961. The miscarriage inspired her most famous poem, Parliament Hill Fields, and sent her on an emotional roller coaster ride.

Sylvia gave birth to her second child in 1962. Feeling isolated from the rest of the world, she wrote and took care of her children full time. Shortly after her son was born, Sylvia discovered that her husband was having an affair and they divorced in September of 1962.

After the divorce, Sylvia reluctantly relocated her small family to an apartment in London. She was low on money, food and she was suffering from what doctors called “an extended flu.” All these difficulties in her life allowed Sylvia to put pen to paper and she woke at four AM each day to write until the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. She published The Bell Jar, an account of the slow emotional breakdown of a young female intern at a NY magazine, under the name Victoria Lucas in January 1963. It would be published under her name in 1971 and Sylvia was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

On the morning of February 11, 1963, Sylvia prepared a plate of bread and butter for her sleeping children, set the plate and two glasses of milk on the kitchen table and turned on her gas stove and stuck her head inside. At the age of 30, on her third attempt at suicide, Sylvia Plath was successful.

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