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The Challenge of Writing Sylvia Plath’s New York Times Obituary 55 Years After She Died

Sylvia Plath in an undated photograph.Credit...Bettmann

This week I wrote the obituary of Sylvia Plath, the poet and the author of “The Bell Jar” (a staple of high school and college reading lists), for our Overlooked series, about women who deserved an obituary in The New York Times at the time of their death but did not get one.

Plath died on Feb. 11, 1963, at the age of 30.

It quickly became apparent to me that I would have to look not only at her past, but also at the future that had not yet happened. It would be something like time traveling, only — unlike time travelers in the movies — I would know the future without having a chance to change it.

The point was that the obituary I was going to write would be very different from the obituary we would have written when Plath died. In some ways, I think, it turned out to be more true to who she really was.

I raised this conundrum with one scholar of memory, Anna Di Lellio, a sociologist who has been collecting the oral histories of women raped in the war in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. How did she deal with the effect of time on memory, with the way we filter the past through the present?

The process she described was similar to what journalists normally do. “In oral history you never use one source only,” she said. “Because people remember incorrectly, or don’t want to remember, or they are in denial and they lie. All testimonies lie. So you try to understand why they omitted something, or why they emphasize something else.”

An assistant district attorney once told me something similar: “Everybody lies.”

Certainly, I thought to myself, it is easier to lie about the distant past, both consciously and unconsciously, because it is less checkable and because it has gone through so many filters in the interim.

Well, not necessarily. Immediately after her death, Plath’s family tried to hide that she had killed herself by turning on a gas oven and putting her head in it. What death notices there were omitted that. Her family put out the word that she had died of viral pneumonia. A blatant lie. Now, omitting her suicide would be impossible; it is public knowledge.

At the time of Plath’s death, “The Bell Jar” had not yet become a classic, beloved by every young woman who ever had a fight with her mother or wanted to be great at something or wrestled with losing her virginity. At the time of her death, Betty Friedan was eight days away from publishing “The Feminine Mystique,” the bible of second-wave feminism, which subsequently made Plath one of its martyrs.

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Sylvia Plath, the poet and the author of “The Bell Jar,” died in 1963. Over 50 years later, New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis wrote Plath’s obituary for our Overlooked series, about women who deserved an obituary in The New York Times at the time of their death but did not get one.

Her suicide opened her tempestuous marriage to scrutiny and drove some fans to deface her gravestone, erasing the married name she shared with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. At the time she died, Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, was only a year old, and her daughter, Frieda, about 3. No one could have predicted that Nicholas would hang himself at the age of 47. Now it felt right to make it part of her obituary.

The fact is, Dr. Di Lellio told me, all this was relevant to the obituary I wrote because “she’s not dead. Icons don’t die. In 1963, she died. But why would you write an obituary 55 years later if she wasn’t still somewhat relevant?”

Dr. Di Lellio was in Kosovo as she spoke to me by phone, and she had just given a talk about a family that had been massacred because it fought back when surrounded by Serbian troops. The leader of the family is always referred to as if he were still alive, she said. Like Plath, he is a legend.

By becoming a household name even without the benefit of an obituary, Sylvia Plath had proven her worth more than many of the people we wrote obituaries about. Half a century later, how many of them still matter?

Keep up with Times Insider stories on Twitter, via the Reader Center: @ReaderCenter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Reach Across Time to Find The Woman Behind the Bell Jar. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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