by Vonda J. Sines

Created on: September 14, 2008

If she were still alive, noted American writer Sylvia Plath would turn 76 next month.

If there is one word that describes her works, life and death, it would have to be "controversial". Although she was also a novelist and writer of short stories, Plath was primarily known for her poems, which belonged to the literary movement known as confessional poetry. This genre was created by Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass. Plath's famous novel, "The Bell Jar," has always been considered semi-autobiographical.

Almost from the moment her suicide at age 30 in 1963 was announced, the circumstances surrounding it were considered controversial. There was no doubt that Plath had a history of mental instability. It included one or more prior attempts to end her own life.

While at a party in Cambridge, England, Sylvia Plath met British poet Ted Hughes. The pair, smitten with each other, underwent a short courtship before getting married in 1956. After living and working for approximately two years in the United States, where Plath taught at Smith College, they moved to Boston. Once she began pregnant, however, they moved back to the United Kingdom and set up housekeeping in London.

As time passed, the marriage was apparently filled with difficulties. The couple separated after Hughes had an affair. Plath and their children rented a flat not far from a house where Yeats had once lived.

Sylvia Plath's death on the morning of February 11, 1963 was ruled a suicide. Authorities noted that she had apparently put her head into an oven and turned on the gas after taking great pains to seal the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with wet towels to protect them. She also left out bread and milk.

The circumstances of the death were considered controversial for many years. Individuals who knew Plath suggested that despite her mentally unstable past, the whole idea of the suicide attempt was both too precise and coincidental to ring true. Writer Peter K. Steinberg ["Biography (1956-1963")] indicated that she was said to have asked her downstairs neighbor when he would be leaving and had actually placed a note instructing the reader to call a named physician, also indicating his telephone number.

Arguments against Plath's death as being caused by suicide were also built at least in part on the timing involved. Given the alleged time of her death, they purport, she would have turned on the gas at a point when her neighbor was just awakening and starting his day. The theory further suggests that the gas would have seeped for several hours through the floor and reached both this neighbor and another resident on the floor below Plath's flat. Proponents also argue that Plath had scheduled an au pair to arrive at 9 a.m. to help her care for the children. However, when the au pair arrived, she was unable to get into the apartment and had to ask painters, who had a key, to let her in the front door.

According to writer Jillian Becker in the book "Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath," a police officer reported that Plath had thrust her head so far into the oven that it was apparent that she had really intended to die.

Plath was buried at Heptonstall Chuch in West Yorkshire. An ironic event following her demise was the death of Assia Wevill, the woman from whom Ted Hughes had left his wife. Wikipedia.com states that Wevill committed suicide in 1969.

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