::birth details:: Sylvia Plath is born in Massachusetts on October 27, 1932 to Dr. Emil Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath.

::family life:: Emil Otto Plath dies on November 5, 1940. Aurelia moves young Sylvia and her younger brother Warren to Wellesley. Sylvia wins a scholarship to Smith College in Massachusetts. She begins her studies at Smith in 1950. In 1952, Sylvia would see her story, "Sunday at the Mintons," published in Mademoiselle. In June of 1953, she would spend a month as a guest editor of Mademoiselle, providing a future storyline for the heroine in her novel, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood.

::suicide:: Emotional turmoil inside Sylvia mounts to a perilous culmination when in August of 1953, Sylvia makes her first attempt at suicide. She leaves a note for her mother, saying she has gone for a long walk and will be back the next morning. Aurelia finds that a steel locked case containing sleeping pills is broken and the pills are missing. Sylvia's disappearance is made public on the the radio and in newspapers after Aurelia calls the police. Three days passed before Warren Plath discovered Sylvia tucked away in a space in the Plath's cellar wall. She has crawled into the small hole with a glass of water and the bottle of sleeping pills. She was hospitalized and treated.

::cambridge:: Sylvia wins a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University in 1955 and starts the term at Newnham College. It was here that she mingled with other young poets and met her future husband, British poet Ted Hughes. Their relationship would be one of volatile proportions, saturated with a passionate intelligence shared by both. Accounts of their first meeting at a Cambridge party recount the way Sylvia was drawn immediately to Ted, who seemed colossal to her. He kissed her, she bit his cheek so hard that the bite drew blood. This would prove to be the beginning of an intense relationship filled with frenzied ecstacy, heartache, bliss, and exquisite artistry.

::marriage:: In June of 1956, Sylvia marries Ted Hughes. They holiday in Spain before settling into a flat on Eltisley Avenue in Cambridge. They lived in near poverty, and Sylvia sacrificed much of her own ambitions for Ted, typing and retyping his poems, sending them out to magazines, helping him gain publication. Her efforts would prove successful when Hughes won the chance to publish his first book of poems, due to Sylvia's relentless efforts. Sylvia the poet and writer had been overshadowed by Sylvia the wife.

::motherhood:: Sylvia promised herself not to have children until she had succeeded. Ted wanted children however, and before Sylvia had the opportunity to establish herself more as a writer, she found herself pregnant with Frieda in 1960 and Nicholas in 1962. Sylvia and her family are now living in Devon at Court Green. They have let their flat in Chalcot Square to David and Assia Wevill.

::suicide:: In 1962, after Nicholas is born, Sylvia drives her car off the road in what she later describes as a suicide attempt.

::infidelity:: Sylvia learns of Ted's affair with Assia Wevill in July of 1962. Assia had left her husband David in London. After Sylvia's discovery of the affair, her disposition was forced to endure an excruiciating pain and humiliation. She had always worried that Ted's many flirtations might be serious, but now her greatest fear was confirmed. The blow was immensely overpowering. In this sense, Sylvia and Ted were polar opposites; Ted was flirtatious and adulterous, while Sylvia was blindly faithful. Ted's only rival was death. Later in the year, Sylvia reveals that she wants a separation from Ted, and later, a divorce. Ted would later on consent to a divorce as well. After searching in London for a suitable flat, Sylvia finds 23 Fitzroy Road, where the poet Yeats once lived. She takes the upstairs maisonette for her and the children.

::the bitter end:: In January of 1963, Sylvia is alone with her two young children at Fitzroy Road, poor, during a furiously cold winter, while Ted was off in Spain cavorting with Assia Wevill. This undoubtedly contributed to Sylvia's mental anguish, though the exact reason for her death will never be known. It was on the morning of February 11, 1963 that Sylvia ended her life. Her suicide was painstakingly executed. She carefully protected her children by sealing off their room with towels and tape, opening their window, and she left food for them. Sylvia died by carbon monoxide poisoning from her oven. If she wrote a suicide note, it hasn't been made public.

::posthumous life:: The genius of Sylvia Plath, though ever present during her troubled life, was never fully brought to knowledge until after her death, when her poetry and writing gained recognition and admiration. Success for Sylvia came in death, though the journey from Sylvia Plath, the gifted young girl, to Sylvia Plath, the poet and writer, was one of terrifying and exhilarating proportions and ultimately robbed the world of a transcendent artisan far before her time.