Plath, Sylvia

(US 1932–63)

Although Sylvia Plath was born and brought up in America, she spent the last few years of her life living in England, married to the poet Ted Hughes. Known foremost as an exceptionally talented poet herself, she is also the author of The Bell Jar (1963), one of the most haunting and powerful twentieth-century novels about mental breakdown. Set in America, it traces the story of Esther's illness, but in its acute satirical portrait of the values of 1950s’ New York society, it makes the reader question where the true disease lies.

Antonia White (The Lost Traveller), J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway)  SA