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50 free Sylvia Plath trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sylvia Plath published one poetry collection and one novel in her lifetime, and yet six decades after her death at 30 she is one of the most read poets in English. This quiz follows the whole story: the Boston childhood and the entomologist father who died when she was eight, the prizes at Smith College, the guest editorship at Mademoiselle that became The Bell Jar, the Fulbright year at Cambridge, the whirlwind marriage to Ted Hughes, the beekeeping in Devon and the astonishing burst of poems in the last months of her life. It also covers what happened afterwards: how Hughes rearranged Ariel, the pen name on The Bell Jar, the posthumous Pulitzer, the destroyed journal, Birthday Letters, the 2004 restored edition, the biopic and the gravestone in Heptonstall. Questions run from easy (which novel she wrote) to expert (the working titles of The Bell Jar). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Plath, her books, her poems and the people around her, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our poetry, Ted Hughes and American literature quizzes next.
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Q 01In which year was Sylvia Plath born?
1932
She was born on 27 October in the Jamaica Plain neighbourhood of Boston; the family later moved to Winthrop and then Wellesley.
Q 02Plath's father Otto, a Boston University biology professor, wrote a 1934 book about which insects?
Bumblebees
His death in 1940, a week and a half after her eighth birthday, haunts poems including 'Daddy' and 'The Colossus'.
Q 03Otto Plath died in 1940 of complications from what?
Untreated diabetes
Convinced he had lung cancer like a friend, he avoided doctors until his diabetes had gone too far, and died after a foot amputation.
Q 04Plath published her first poem at what age?
Eight
It appeared in the children's section of a local newspaper; she began keeping a journal at 11.
Q 05Which private women's college in Massachusetts did Plath attend from 1950?
Smith
She lived in Haven House and then Lawrence House, where a plaque marks her old room, and edited the Smith Review.
Q 06After her third year of college Plath spent a month in New York as a guest editor at which magazine?
Mademoiselle
She was one of twenty young women chosen; the disappointing summer became raw material for The Bell Jar.
Q 07Which Welsh poet was Plath furious to have missed meeting during her New York summer of 1953?
Dylan Thomas
A boyfriend said she loved his work 'more than life itself'; the magazine's editor had arranged the meeting without her.
Q 08Which novelist paid for Plath's Smith scholarship and her 1953 stay at McLean Hospital?
Olive Higgins Prouty
Prouty, the author of Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager, appears thinly disguised as Philomena Guinea in The Bell Jar.
Q 09Plath's undergraduate thesis studied 'the double' in two novels by which author?
Dostoyevsky
The Magic Mirror earned her a summa cum laude degree in June 1955.
Q 10Plath went to Cambridge University on which scholarship?
Fulbright
She lived in a detached house called Whitstead on the edge of her college grounds.
Q 11At which Cambridge college was Plath a student?
Newnham
She studied there with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard.
Q 12Plath met Ted Hughes in February 1956 at a party launching which poetry magazine?
St. Botolph's Review
She had read his poems in the magazine and wanted to meet him; they married four months later.
Q 13Plath and Hughes married on 16 June 1956, a date chosen in honour of what?
Bloomsday
The wedding was at St George the Martyr in Holborn, London, with Plath's mother as the only witness.
Q 21Which hobby, taken up at Court Green in 1962, gave Plath the subject of 'The Bee Meeting' and 'Swarm'?
Beekeeping
Her father had been an authority on the same insects.
Q 22Hughes left Plath in 1962 for Assia Wevill, who had been introduced to the couple how?
She and her husband sublet the Hugheses' flat
The Wevills took over the Chalcot Square flat in 1961 and were invited to Court Green in May 1962.
Q 23In December 1962 Plath rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, London, once home to which poet?
W. B. Yeats
Q 14Back in the US in 1959, Plath attended a writing seminar at Boston University taught by which poet?
Robert Lowell
George Starbuck was a classmate; the style the group developed became known as confessional poetry.
Q 15Which fellow poet in that seminar, later a Pulitzer winner for Live or Die, urged Plath to write as a woman?
Anne Sexton
Plath discussed her suicide attempt openly with her; Lowell thought the tightly controlled Plath could learn from her looseness.
Q 16M. L. Rosenthal first applied 'confessional' in 1959 to which book by Plath's seminar teacher?
Life Studies
Plath later told the BBC the book had profoundly influenced the poetry of her final phase.
Q 17Plath said she learned 'to be true to my own weirdnesses' during a 1959 stay at which artists' colony?
Yaddo
She and Hughes went there after a long camping trip across Canada, the US and Mexico.
Q 18Plath's first collection, and the only poetry book published in her lifetime, was called what?
The Colossus
Heinemann published it in the UK in October 1960, the year her daughter Frieda was born.
Q 19Plath's daughter Frieda was born in April 1960 and her son in January 1962. What was his name?
Nicholas
Nicholas Farrar Hughes became a fisheries biologist in Alaska.
Q 20In 1961 Plath and Hughes moved to Court Green, a house in North Tawton in which English county?
Devon
They kept bees there from mid-1962, the subject of poems such as 'The Arrival of the Bee Box' and 'Stings'.
The house bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet; the winter that followed was one of the coldest on record.
Q 24Under what pen name was The Bell Jar first published in January 1963?
Victoria Lucas
The name protected the real people behind the characters, and Plath herself in case the reviews were bad; they were largely indifferent.
Q 25Who is the narrator and heroine of The Bell Jar?
Esther Greenwood
A 19-year-old from the Boston suburbs, she wins a summer internship at the fictional Ladies' Day magazine in New York.
Q 26In which year was The Bell Jar finally published in the United States?
1971
When it finally appeared it became an instant best-seller and has been translated into more than forty languages.
Q 27Which of these was an early working title for The Bell Jar?
The Girl in the Mirror
Another was Diary of a Suicide; the American publisher Harper & Row initially rejected the manuscript as 'juvenile and overwrought'.
Q 28Plath died in London on 11 February 1963 at what age?
30
Her live-in nurse was due at nine that morning; the inquest four days later recorded suicide.
Q 29Plath is buried in the churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle in Heptonstall, in which English county?
West Yorkshire
Hughes came from nearby Mytholmroyd; the inscription he chose reads 'Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.'
Q 30Ariel, the collection on which Plath's reputation rests, was published in the UK in which year?
1965
Faber & Faber issued it two years after her death; the US edition followed in 1966 with an introduction by her old seminar teacher.