American poet and novelist whose late book Ariel — written in the last months of her life and published two years after her suicide in February 1963 — has become one of the most read, anthologized, and disputed bodies of work in twentieth-century English-language poetry. Plath was a precocious student (Smith, Cambridge on a Fulbright), married the British poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and produced two children before the marriage broke up in 1962. The roughly forty Ariel poems were written, at white heat, in the months that followed.
The reception of Plath has had to contend with the biographical fact of her suicide and the way the late poems — "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "Edge" — appear to address it. The danger of reading the poems as suicide notes has been countered by critics who insist on their formal achievement and their historical reach: "Daddy" is not only about her father but about the German occupation, the Holocaust, and the figure of the patriarch. The novel The Bell Jar (1963), published a month before her death under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, is a precise account of a young woman's mental breakdown and electroconvulsive treatment that has had a sustained life as a feminist text without being one in any programmatic sense.
The textual history of Ariel is complicated: the 1965 edition was selected and arranged by Ted Hughes, who removed and added poems to the order Plath had left. The 2004 Ariel: The Restored Edition, edited by their daughter Frieda Hughes, presents Plath's intended sequence. The recovery of Plath's full Letters in two volumes (2017–2018) and the full Journals (2000) has shifted scholarly understanding considerably.