ABOVE: Sylvia Plath pictured in 1954

Plath was crippled by insomnia and her inability to write a word. She was diagnosed as suffering from severe depression, and underwent her first course of the now controversial electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). The treatment traumatized Plath who shortly afterwards took fistfuls of sleeping pills, crawled into a hole under her house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and waited for the end.

She would later write of how she “blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion.” Two days later, with her family frantically searching unaware she was under their feet, Plath was discovered moaning and barely conscious.

While Plath’s creative crisis that summer may have triggered her breakdown, arguably it had been within her since childhood. Probably since the day, a week after her eighth birthday, when her father Otto died of complications from untreated diabetes. Upon being told the news, Plath vowed never to speak to God again and in her 1962 poem Daddy wrote: “At 20, I tried to die / and get back, back, back to you / I thought even the bones would do.” For the rest of Plath’s life, the depression was always there, waiting patiently for her.

Madness & Genius

Plath’s work and her mental illness have, in the 49 years since her death, become inextricably intertwined. The debate on how they fed each other has raged among scholars, feminists or otherwise: did her high intelligence leave her more susceptible to depression? Did her depression fuel periods of great creativity? At its most crude: is there a link between genius and madness?

In 2001, Professor James C Kaufman did indeed find a link – naming it the ‘Sylvia Plath effect’. He conducted a study of 1,629 writers, which revealed that poets and in particular, female poets, are more likely to exhibit symptoms of mental illness. In a second study of 520 high-profile American women, he again found that poets were more likely to have mental disorders than women of other professions such as journalists, politicians and actresses. “I think the same things that make people sensitive to problems in their life can also give people the kind of life insight that leads to being more creative,” says Professor Kaufman. “So the same factors that were ultimately personally harmful to Plath may have enriched her poetry.” For much of her life, Plath was able to balance depression and creativity, though there was clearly a connection between her periods of great productivity and her darkest hours.

Sylvia Plath: The life of a tortured poet