Not long ago, I read a biography on Sylvia Plath which was by Elizabeth Winder and called Pain, Parties, Work. It details Sylvia’s time spent at Mademoiselle as a college editor in the summer of 1953. After this experience, Sylvia experienced a mental break and tried to commit suicide, an experience which she detailed in a semi-autobiographical account in The Bell Jar.
What Elizabeth Winders biography did was give me a look at Sylvia Plath outside of the books fictional version. Sylvia in real life, as a student at Smith, was full of promise with the expectation that she will be a writer something even the magazine heads recognized in her. Sylvia spent a summer being overworked, and exhausted not only working on the 1953 college issue but also attending all of the events the college issue editors were supposed to attend that had been arranged by the magazine.
Sylvia in comparison
