Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

From Great Lives by BBC Radio 4

October 27, 2025 · 27 min

About this episode

Lucy Jones discusses the life and work of Sylvia Plath, exploring her struggles with mental health and the impact of her poetry.

Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, chooses the writer Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath was a precocious, prize-winning child,. Her mother had high expectations for her. Her father had died when she was 8 (but could have been saved if only he'd gone to see a doctor). When she was well, Plath was energetic, fun, bright, attractive, funny and incredibly smart. Her first depressive episode at the age of 20, was 'treated' with botched electric shock therapy. She was awake throughout the ordeal, which left her terrified and traumatised. Lucy Jones believes that Plath has an unfair reputation as a depressing writer, because of the shadow that her suicide casts backwards over her life. But Jones finds Plath's poetry incredibly alive, brave, comforting and inspiring. "I don't think I would have been able to write Matrescence without Plath's work" Both Lucy Jones and Plath's biographer, Heather Clark, believe that at the end of her life, recently separated and struggling through a particularly bad winter with two very small children, she may have been suffering from post-natal depression. With archive recordings of Sylvia Plath reading her poems Daddy and Mushrooms, as well as being interviewed…

People in this episode

Host: Matthew Parris

Guest: Lucy Jones

Topics covered

  • Sylvia Plath
  • mental health
  • poetry
  • biography
  • post-natal depression

Keywords

  • Sylvia Plath
  • Lucy Jones
  • poetry
  • mental health
  • post-natal depression
  • biography

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Matrescence, Daddy, Mushrooms

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