Sylvia Plath Effect
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Sylvia Plath Effect
The Sylvia Plath effect is the phenomenon that poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers. The term was coined in 2001 by psychologist James C. Kaufman, and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed. The effect is named after author Sylvia Plath, who died by suicide at the age of 30. Building on the more general research that, from early adolescence through adulthood, women are twice as likely as men to experience depression, Kaufman's work further demonstrated that female poets were more likely to experience mental illness than any other class of writers. In addition, female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other eminent women, such as politicians, actresses, and artists. Although many studies (e.g., Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995) have demonstrated that creative writers are prone to mental illness, this relationship has not been examined in depth. Kaufman himself wrote an editorial for ''Europe ...
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Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for '' The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960), '' Ariel'' (1965), and '' The Bell Jar'', a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. ''The Collected Poems'' was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honor posthumously. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and the University of Cambridge, England, where she was a student at Newnham College. Plath later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. Their relationship was tumultu ...
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Florbela Espanca
Florbela Espanca (; born , ) was a Portuguese poet. She is known for her passionate and feminist poetry. Fernando Pessoa later said she was his "twin soul". Early life Born Flor Bela d'Alma da Conceição on 8 December 1894 in Vila Viçosa, Portugal, Espanca was the daughter of Antónia da Conceição Lobo who worked as a housemaid for Espanca's father, João Maria Espanca, a photographer and businessman. Her father's wife, Mariana do Carmo Inglesa Espanca, who was unable to have her own children, agreed for Espanca to live in their home, where she was raised from birth by both her father's wife and her biological mother, who was 15 years old when Espanca was born. Since her parents weren't married, when Espanca was baptized on 20 June 1895, she was christened as Flor Bela Lobo, the daughter of Antónia Lobo and an unknown father. Her father, whom Espanca referred to in a poem as "dear Daddy of my soul", officially claimed paternity in 1949, 19 years after Espanca's death. Esp ...
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Sara Teasdale
Sara Trevor Teasdale (later Filsinger; August 8, 1884January 29, 1933) was an American lyric poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Filsinger after her 1914 marriage. In 1918, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection ''Love Songs''. Biography Sara Teasdale was born on August 8, 1884. She had poor health for much of her childhood, so she was home schooled until age 9. It was at age 10 that she was well enough to begin school. She started at Mary Institute in 1898, but switched to Hosmer Hall in 1899, graduating in 1903. The Teasdale family lived at 3668 Lindell Blvd. and then 38 Kingsbury Place in St. Louis, Missouri. Both homes were designed by Sara's mother. The house on Kingsbury Place had a private suite for Sara on the second floor. Guests entered through a separate entrance and were admitted by appointment. This suite is where Sara worked, slept, and often dined alone. From 1904 to 1907, Teasdale was a member of The Potters, led by ...
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Eleanor Marx
Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898), sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a Socialism, socialist activist who sometimes worked as a Translation#Literary translation, literary translator. In March 1898, after discovering that her partner Edward Aveling had secretly married the previous year, she suicide by poisoning, poisoned herself at the age of 43. Biography Early years Eleanor Marx was born in London on 16 January 1855, the sixth child and fourth daughterBrodie, FranEleanor Marxin ''Workers' Liberty''. Retrieved 23 April 2007. of Karl Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen. She was called "Tussy" by her family from a young age. She showed an early interest in politics, even writing to political figures during her childhood.
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Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey; November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional poetry, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book ''Live or Die (book), Live or Die''. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom she physically and sexually assaulted. Early life and family Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray (Staples) Harvey (1901–1959) and Ralph Churchill Harvey (1900–1959). She had two older sisters, Jane Elizabeth (Harvey) Jealous (1923–1983) and Blanche Dingley (Harvey) Taylor (1925–2011). She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland Junior College, Garland School. For a time she model (person ...
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Sanmao (author)
Sanmao ( zh, c=三毛, p=Sānmáo) was the pen name of Echo Chen Ping (born Chen Mao-ping; 26 March 1943 – 4 January 1991), a Taiwanese writer and translator. Her works range from autobiographical writing, travel writing and reflective novels, to translations of Spanish-language comic strips. She studied philosophy and taught German before becoming a career writer. Her pen name was adopted from the main character of Zhang Leping's most famous work, ''Sanmao''. In English, she was also known as Echo or Echo Chan, the first name she used in Latin script, after the eponymous Greek nymph. Since childhood, she was said to have avoided writing the character "Mao" (懋) as it was too complex; later in life, she legally changed her name to Chen Ping. Early life She was born Chen Mao-ping in Chongqing to Chen Siqing, a lawyer, and Miao Jinlan. She had an older sister, Chen Tianxin. Her parents were devout Christians. Her family was from Zhejiang. After the Second Sino-Japanese W ...
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Kay Sage
Katherine Linn Sage (June 25, 1898 – January 8, 1963), usually known as Kay Sage, was an American Surrealism, Surrealist artist and poet active between 1936 and 1963. A member of the Golden Age and post-war periods of Surrealism, she is mostly recognized for her artistic works, which typically contain themes of an architectural nature. Through her marriage to an Italian prince, she became princess of San Faustino in 1925. She was also the sister-in-law of Donna Virginia Bourbon del Monte, wife of industrialist Edoardo Agnelli (entrepreneur, born 1892), Edoardo Agnelli of the Agnelli family. Biography Sage was born in Albany, New York, into a family made wealthy from the timber industry. Her father, Henry M. Sage, was a state assemblyman the year after her birth and later was a five-term state senator. Her mother was Anne Wheeler (Ward) Sage. Sage had an elder sister, Anne Erskine Sage. Early life Anne Wheeler Ward Sage left her husband and older daughter soon after Kay's birt ...
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Alejandra Pizarnik
Flora Alejandra Pizarnik (29 April 1936 – 25 September 1972) was an Argentine poet. Her idiosyncratic and thematically introspective poetry has been considered "one of the most unusual bodies of work in Latin American literature", and has been recognized and celebrated for its fixation on "the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, the nature of intimacy, madness, nddeath". Pizarnik studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and worked as a writer and a literary critic for several publishers and magazines. She lived in Paris between 1960 and 1964, where she translated authors such as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire and Yves Bonnefoy. She also studied history of religion and French literature at the Sorbonne. Back in Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published three of her major works: ''Works and Nights'', ''Extracting the Stone of Madness'', and ''The Musical Hell'' as well as a prose work titled ''The Bloody Countess''. In 1969 she received a Gugg ...
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Christiana Morgan
Christiana Drummond Morgan (born Christiana Drummond Councilman; October 6, 1897 – March 14, 1967) was a lay psychoanalyst, artist, and co-director of the renowned Harvard Psychological Clinic. She is best known for co-authoring the Thematic Apperception Test, one of the most widely used projective psychological tests. Morgan played a crucial yet often overlooked role in the development of 20th-century psychology, particularly through her collaboration with Carl Jung and her pioneering work in Jungian and feminist psychology. Her contributions gained renewed recognition with Claire Douglas's 1993 biography, "Translate This Darkness," and subsequent scholarly interest. Early life Christiana Drummond Councilman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 6, 1897. She grew up in an elite Boston family, with her father, William Thomas Councilman, serving as the Shattuck Professor of Pathological Anatomy at Harvard Medical School, and her mother, Isabella, being an established mem ...
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Alda Merini
Alda Merini (21 March 1931 – 1 November 2009) was an Italian writer and poet. Her work earned the attention and admiration of other Italian writers, such as Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Merini's writing style has been described as intense, passionate and mystic, and it is influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of her most dramatic poems concern her time in a mental health institution (from 1964 to 1970). Her 1986 poem ''The Other Truth. Diary of a Misfit'' (L'altra verità. Diario di una diversa) is considered one of her masterpieces. In 1996 she was nominated by the Académie Française as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2002 she was made Dame of the Republic. In 2007 she won the Elsa Morante Ragazzi Award with ''Alda e Io – Favole'' (Alda and Me: Fairytales), a poem written in cooperation with the fable author Sabatino Scia. In the same year, she received an honorary degree in Theory of Communication and Languages at ...
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Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane (3 February 1971 – 20 February 1999) was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action. Kane herself and scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, have identified some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy. The critic Aleks Sierz saw her work as part of a confrontational style and sensibility of drama termed " in-yer-face theatre". Sierz originally called Kane "the quintessential in-yer-face writer of the 990s but later remarked in 2009 that although he initially "thought she was very typical of the new writing of the middle 1990s", " e further we get away from that in time, the more un-typical she seems to be" ...
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Ingrid Jonker
Ingrid Jonker (19 September 1933 – 19 July 1965) was a South African poet and one of the founders of modern Afrikaans literature. Her poems have been widely translated into other languages. Born into an Afrikaner family with four hundred year old roots in South Africa, Ingrid Jonker grew up in a broken home. After the death of her mother, she and her sister Anna moved in with their estranged father, where they faced secret and escalating emotional abuse from their step mother before both moving out. During the 1950s and 1960s, which saw the Sharpeville massacre, the increasingly draconian enforcement of Apartheid laws, and escalating terrorism committed both by Government security forces and by uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress, Jonker chose to affiliate herself with Cape Town's racially mixed Bohemianism, literary bohemia, which gathered around her fellow Afrikaner people, Afrikaner poet and literary mentor Uys Krige in the beach-sid ...
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