American poet who came to Paris in the spring of 1956, in the middle of her Fulbright year at Cambridge, to find the man she had been in love with for three years — and found he had gone. She had met Ted Hughes weeks before; she married him that June, and the honeymoon came back through Paris.
Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel, the book of late poems that changed what a poem in English was allowed to sound like, and The Bell Jar, the novel about a bright young woman's breakdown that has never been out of print. She was born in Boston in 1932, published her first poem as a child, and died in London in 1963 at thirty, having published one slim collection of poems and, a month before her death, a novel under a false name — the rest of her work was still in manuscript.
Her Paris is a few weeks in the spring of 1956 and it is one of the hinges of her life. She was twenty-three, six months into the first year of a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge, and she came to the city to find Richard Sassoon, the American she had been in love with since her college years and who was then studying in France. He had gone, and left word that he needed to be alone. She stayed anyway and walked the city. Weeks earlier, at a party in Cambridge, she had met a young English poet called Ted Hughes. She married him that June, and the honeymoon began in Paris.
Plath was born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, a German-born biology professor at Boston University and an authority on bumblebees, died when she was eight — a loss that runs, undisguised, through the poems she wrote at the end of her life. She began keeping a journal at eleven and was publishing in magazines while still at school. In 1950 she entered Smith College, a women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1955 summa cum laude, the highest of the three grades of academic honours awarded at an American university. In between came the summer described in The Bell Jar: a month as a student guest editor at Mademoiselle, the New York fashion magazine that took on a dozen college women each June, a collapse on her return home, a suicide attempt and months of psychiatric treatment.
She then won a Fulbright scholarship — the United States government programme that sends American students to study abroad — and went to Newnham College at the University of Cambridge in England — then one of only two colleges in the university that admitted women — for the academic year 1955 to 1956. This is the year that puts her within reach of Paris: one boat train away, the through service that ran from London to the Channel ferry and on to a Paris terminus, with three long university vacations in the year and an American boyfriend on the other side of the water.
Richard Sassoon was an American of French descent whom Plath had met during her Smith years, and by 1956 the most serious attachment of her life so far. He was in France, studying at the Sorbonne. She had already spent part of the previous Christmas vacation with him in Paris and the south of France, and she came back in the spring vacation of 1956 expecting to find him again.
He was not there. He had left the city, having written that he needed to be alone, and Plath arrived to an absence. What she did then is the part worth keeping: she stayed. She took a room, called on the friends and acquaintances she could find, and spent days walking Paris by herself — the journals and letters of these weeks are a young writer's record of a city being used as consolation, and of a woman deciding, out loud and on paper, what she was going to do next. She went on from Paris to Italy before returning to Cambridge for the summer term.
Weeks before she left for Paris, on a February night in Cambridge, she had gone to the launch party for the St Botolph's Review — a student literary magazine that ran to exactly one issue — and met one of its contributors, a Yorkshire poet named Ted Hughes, then twenty-five and working in London. What happened between them has become the most retold anecdote in modern English poetry: they shouted each other's poems over the noise of the party, he kissed her and pulled the band from her hair, and she bit him on the cheek hard enough to draw blood. It lasted a few minutes. She went to Paris looking for Sassoon with Hughes already in her head, and the sequence matters: the Paris weeks are the hinge between one life and the other.
Plath and Hughes married in London on 16 June 1956, less than four months after they met, and went abroad for the honeymoon — Paris first, then on to Spain for the summer. It was her third stay in the city inside six months, and the only happy one.
What followed was a working marriage of two poets, unusually literal about it: Plath typed Hughes's manuscript and entered it, without much ceremony, in an American competition for a first book of poems, run by the Poetry Center in New York and judged by three of the best-known poets writing in English — Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. It won, and Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, appeared in 1957. They taught for a period in the United States, returned to England, and had two children — Frieda in 1960 and Nicholas in January 1962. Plath's own first collection, The Colossus, was published in England in 1960 and in the United States two years later. In August 1961 the family moved to Court Green, a house in Devon.
In 1962 Hughes left Plath for Assia Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill; the two couples had met when the Wevills took over the Hugheses' London flat. Plath moved with the two children to a flat of her own in Primrose Hill in north London, in a house where the poet W. B. Yeats had once lived, and in the winter that followed wrote most of the poems that make up Ariel — short, fast, formally exact and savage, written in the early mornings before the children woke. They are the poems that made her reputation and they were almost all written in a few months. In January 1963 her novel The Bell Jar was published in London under the pen name Victoria Lucas.
She took her own life at the London flat on 11 February 1963. She was thirty. She left behind a manuscript of the Ariel poems, arranged in an order of her own; the book was published in 1965 in a version edited by Hughes, and her original arrangement was not printed until 2004. The Collected Poems, edited by Hughes, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 — the first time the prize for poetry had gone to a poet who was already dead.
Her papers are split between two American libraries. The larger literary archive is the Sylvia Plath collection in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College, the Massachusetts college she attended: poems, journals, articles and correspondence to and from her, along with photographs and objects. The other is the Lilly Library at Indiana University, which holds the childhood and student material and the long run of letters she wrote home to her mother. Her unabridged journals were published in 2000, edited by the Smith curator Karen V. Kukil; the first volume of her collected letters, covering the years to 1956 and therefore the whole of her Paris, followed in 2017.
Born on 27 October in Boston, Massachusetts.
Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating summa cum laude.
Goes to Newnham College, Cambridge, on a Fulbright scholarship — the year that puts Paris within reach.
February: meets the poet Ted Hughes at the launch party for the one-issue Cambridge magazine the St Botolph's Review.
Spring vacation: goes to Paris to find Richard Sassoon and discovers he has left the city, having written that he needed to be alone. She stays on, and walks Paris alone for the best part of a fortnight.
16 June: marries Ted Hughes in London. The honeymoon goes to Paris first, then on to Spain.
Hughes's first collection The Hawk in the Rain wins an American competition Plath had entered on his behalf, judged by Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
Her first collection, The Colossus, is published in England; daughter Frieda is born.
The family moves to Court Green in Devon in August 1961; son Nicholas is born in January 1962.
Hughes leaves for Assia Wevill. Plath moves to London with the children and, that winter, writes most of the Ariel poems.
January: The Bell Jar is published in London under the pen name Victoria Lucas.
Dies in London on 11 February, aged thirty.
The Collected Poems wins the Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded posthumously for poetry.
To find Richard Sassoon. He was an American she had known since her years at Smith College and the most serious attachment of her life to that point, and he was studying in France. She travelled over during the Cambridge spring vacation of 1956, in the middle of her Fulbright year, and found that he had left the city, having written that he needed to be alone. She stayed on in Paris regardless, saw the friends she could find, and spent days walking the city by herself.
Not long, and more than once. She spent part of the Christmas vacation of 1955 in Paris and the south of France with Richard Sassoon, came back for roughly a fortnight in the spring vacation of 1956 — the visit on which he had gone — and returned again in June 1956 at the start of her honeymoon with Ted Hughes. Three visits inside about six months, none of them a residence.
In February 1956, at the launch party in Cambridge for the St Botolph's Review, a student literary magazine that ran to a single issue and to which Hughes had contributed. They married in London on 16 June 1956, under four months later, and went to Paris and then Spain for the honeymoon.
The collection of poems Plath wrote in the last months of her life, mostly in the winter of 1962 to 1963, after Ted Hughes left her and she moved to London with their two children. They are short, fast, exact and furious, and they are what her reputation rests on. She left a manuscript arranged in her own order; the book published in 1965 was edited by Hughes and printed a different selection and sequence, and her own arrangement was not published until 2004.
Substantially. The novel follows a gifted young American woman through a summer guest-editorship at a New York magazine, a breakdown, a suicide attempt and psychiatric treatment — the course of Plath's own summer of 1953, between her years at Smith. She published it in London in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas, a month before she died.
She took her own life at her flat in London on 11 February 1963, aged thirty. She had been living apart from Ted Hughes since the previous year, caring for two small children through an exceptionally cold winter, and writing the poems that became Ariel. Her work was largely unpublished at her death; The Collected Poems, edited by Hughes, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
The largest literary archive is the Sylvia Plath collection in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College, the Massachusetts college she attended: poems, journals, articles and correspondence to and from her, plus photographs and personal objects, spanning roughly 1930 to 1998; the Lilly Library at Indiana University holds the rest, chiefly the early work and her letters home to her mother. Her unabridged journals were published in 2000, edited by the Smith curator Karen V. Kukil, and the first volume of her collected letters — the years up to and including 1956, which is all of her Paris — appeared in 2017.
Visited · 1955–1956
Three short stays inside about six months, all during Plath's Fulbright year at Cambridge, and all recorded in her own journals and letters: part of the Christmas vacation of 1955 with Richard Sassoon, the American she had loved since her Smith College years; the spring vacation of 1956, when she crossed to find him and learned he had left the city; and June 1956, when she and Ted Hughes began their honeymoon there. She never lived in Paris.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Sylvia Plath and their work.
Biographical outline: Smith, the Fulbright, the marriage, the books, the Pulitzer.
Her letters to 1956 — the primary record of the Paris weeks and of Richard Sassoon.
The unabridged journals, edited by the Smith curator Karen V. Kukil.
The Sylvia Plath collection at Smith College, where the bulk of the literary papers are held.
The Ted Hughes Society's life of Hughes: the St Botolph's Review party, the marriage and honeymoon, the children, Court Green.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Sylvia Plath. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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