The Fitzroy Road Kitchen

February 11, 1963, the third-floor flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, London. Sylvia Plath, thirty, the American poet whose only novel The Bell Jar has been published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas a month earlier and whose second collection Ariel will be published posthumously by her estranged husband Ted Hughes in 1965, places towels and wet cloths along the base of the kitchen door, leaves bread and milk in her two young children's bedroom upstairs, opens the windows of their room, and puts her head in the gas oven. Her children — Frieda, two; Nicholas, one — are unharmed. Plath has been on a high dose of an MAOI antidepressant. The British winter of 1962-63 has been the coldest on record.

Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier — in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where Plath was born on October 27, 1932, the elder of two children of a Boston University entomology professor named Otto Plath — and follows the arc through the long childhood the death of her father at eight shaped, the Wellesley public-school years, the Smith College scholarship years and the August 1953 nervous breakdown that produced The Bell Jar, the McLean Hospital electroconvulsive therapy, the Fulbright at Newnham College Cambridge and the 1956 meeting and June marriage of Ted Hughes, the long American teaching year of 1957-58, the Yaddo and Devon years, the births of Frieda and Nicholas, the 1962 Hughes-and-Assia Wevill affair and the September 1962 separation, the long October 1962 Ariel-poem month that produced the late masterpieces, and the morning of February 11.

What emerges is a portrait of the American poet whose thirty-year life produced the canonical late twentieth-century American poetry collection and the canonical late twentieth-century American autobiographical novel — and whose mental illness the medicine of her time was not equipped to treat.