Who was Sylvia Plath?

Sylvia Plath was undeniably the most talented woman writer of her generation and yet people mostly remember her from dramatic tabloid headlines. To this day, people attend to retrace what exactly happened and sometimes mistakenly use her poetry to find clues. For instance, her poem 'Full Moon' is usually interpreted as a reference to the affair between her husband and Asya – however, the poem was written a couple of years before this happened. Most of her poems dealing with death dates back to her early writing, at the exception of the very last poem of her final collection, Ariel. A look at the original manuscript for Ariel shows that the very last poem she wrote is a light-hearted one about her children playing, 'Balloon'. Even though her suicide is usually the first thing that comes to mind, this is not what Sylvia Plath's writing is about.

According to her daughter, she was allergic to the medication she was taking, and ended up killing herself because of a chemical imbalance in her brain – not to get attention or to upset her ex-husband. But her estate did not see it that way: her suicide was a perfect way to make her into a tortured romantic figure. Her first novel, The Bell Jar soared in the best-seller lists and her last collection of poems, Ariel, did pretty well too. Over the years, Sylvia Plath has become a caricature of a neurotic woman, and reading Sylvia Plath is seen as nonconformist.

To fully understand who this woman was, one should read her poetry as well as her journals. She was ambitious, she had high expectations for her career but also valued her family. Her childhood is filled with hardships, but these experiences have helped her become a great writer. She worked hard and developed a unique talent. She knew how to find the right words and create the perfect image that would evoke a unique feeling for the reader. In the end, I think reading Sylvia Plath's writing is what matters, not what was written about her in an effort to explain what happened.