Sylvia Plath: Will the poet always be defined by her death? - BBC Culture
When a female author dies by suicide, it defines her. From Virginia Woolf to Sarah Kane, everything she did, everything she created during her life becomes part of a death-drive narrative. When a male author dies prematurely, it is a tragic stopper in his creative output – we mourn the poetry Dylan Thomas never wrote after he died aged 39 in 1953, for example, distinct from his self-destructive lifestyle. Woolf's novels and Kane's plays are dubbed as being manifestations of mental illness, while Thomas's poetry is brilliant in spite of, rather than because of, his alcoholism and troubled life. More like this:
Chief among those female artists who have become defined by their suicide is the US poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who died on 11 February 1963. Since then, her name has become a by-word for female angst. Her works represent rebellious but depressed young women as evidenced by their appearance in pop-culture settings – Kat in the 1999 teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You clutches a copy of The Bell Jar, as does Maeve in recent Netflix series Sex Education. Plath has become a crude symbol of the girl outsider who rejects conventional standards of femininity to take her life, and death, into her own hands.
There is a steady stream of biographical works about Sylvia Plath, including three notable releases in the last 18 months (Credit: Alamy)
