Plath's Background

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston USA and grew up in a comfortable middle-class home.

She went to university in Boston and Cambridge, England. Plath was an excellent student. She suffered a nervous breakdown in college. She recovered but depression remained a big problem for her.

Many of her poems are a terrifying record of her depression.

At Cambridge University she met and married the British poet Ted Hughes. They settled in England and had two children. Then the marriage ended‘Child’ shows Plath’s tender feelings for her infant child and her mental illness. She committed suicide at the age of thirty in 1963, two weeks after she wrote this poem.