Sylvia Plath

Plath's father, a domineering entomology professor, died when she was eight after refusing treatment for diabetes, a loss that haunts her poetry and fiction alike. A scholarship student at Smith College, she suffered a breakdown and underwent electroconvulsive treatment after a summer guest-editing a New York magazine, an ordeal she later transposed into The Bell Jar.

A Fulbright took her to Cambridge, where she married the poet Ted Hughes in 1956; the marriage produced two children and, after his affair became known, a separation. The Bell Jar appeared in London in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, weeks before she took her own life in a freezing flat with a gas oven, having sealed the door to her sleeping children's room.

Hughes controlled her literary estate for decades, editing and destroying portions of her journals, feeding years of controversy over how her legacy was shaped by others after her death.