Letters Home

When he dies, his marks will not be written on his gravestone. If he has loved a book, been kind to someone, enjoyed a certain colour in the sea - that is the thing that will show whether he has lived.
-Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

It was during her undergraduate years that Plath began to suffer the symptoms of severe depression that would ultimately lead to her death. In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it." This is an eloquent description of bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, a very serious illness for which no genuinely effective medications were available during Plath's lifetime. In August of 1953, at the age of nineteen, Plath attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She survived the attempt and was hospitalized, receiving treatment with electro-shock therapy. Her experiences of breakdown and recovery were later turned into fiction for her only published novel, The Bell Jar.
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