This article was written by Jeffrey Round
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| Plath's Grandmother's house |
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During her early years, Sylvia Plath lived in a number of places in Massachusetts. Of her youthful residences, none is more bleakly picturesque than Winthrop-By-The-Sea and the adjacent Point Shirley. It is a fitting childhood home for a poet whose words are more intensely chilling than almost any other.
Although Plath eventually moved to England with her husband, poet Ted Hughes, and died there by her own hand at the age of 30, her writing was formed long before. Certainly, her time in Winthrop contributed to it. And while the town may not have been responsible for her recurring mental instability, one of the most devastating and lasting events of her short life occurred there when her father died.
The Plath family moved to Winthrop in 1936 in the middle of the Great Depression. Sylvia's father, Otto, as a professor of German and biology, was able to get a mortgage to buy a house. Sylvia's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop. Her grandparents, the Schobers, still lived on Point Shirley. It was here Sylvia saw her first poem published, in the Boston Herald's children's section, when she was eight. It was also here that Otto Plath died in 1940, leaving his daughter an ambiguous legacy of love, loss and unanswered questions.
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