Why Did Sylvia Plath Die?

Yesterday, February 11th, marked the anniversary of Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963. For fans and followers, her death is shrouded in as much mystery as ever before. What was the catalyst to her eventual suicide? TIME honors the day of her death by ruminating over her untimely death's continuous mystery.

What drove Sylvia Plath to her death was painfully clear to her psychiatrist: clinical depression. But after the acclaimed poet, just 30 years old, committed suicide on this day, Feb. 11, in 1963, her friends, fans, and biographers were eager to blame the tragedy instead on a flesh-and-blood villain.

There were several contenders to choose from. The most obvious was her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who had recently abandoned Plath and their two young children to run off with his mistress. The fact that his mistress committed suicide six years later, just as Plath had done — by putting her head in an oven and turning on the gas — underlined his guilt in the eyes of the Daily Mail and many others.

TIME took the Freudian approach, and in its review of the poetry collection Plath produced in her final months alive, points its finger at her father, “an intellectual tyrant” who was a professor of entomology at Boston University. (In true Freudian style, it also implicated Plath’s mother, “a metallic New England schoolmarm.”)[...]

Learn more at TIME. And do take the time to visit one of Plath's poems here, or find out more about how she lived her life with this post by David Trinidad.