November 1940

November 1940 marks the death of Sylvia Plath’s father, when she was eight years old. The loss altered the family’s life: her mother, grandparents, and children left the seaside town of Winthrop and moved inland to Wellesley, a conservative, upper-middle-class suburb of Boston.

The Family Before the Move

Plath had been born in Massachusetts in 1932 and spent her early childhood in Winthrop, near Boston. Her father, an internationally known authority on bees and a distinguished professor of biology at Boston University, had emigrated from Poland as an adolescent. Her mother’s parents were Austrian, and Plath had a brother two and a half years younger than she was.

Death and Relocation

Her father died after a long, difficult illness in November 1940. The family’s move to Wellesley followed this loss, making the month a turning point in Plath’s childhood as well as a date in the family’s history. In the new household, her grandmother assumed responsibility for domestic care, while her mother taught in Boston University’s medical-secretarial training program and commuted each day. Her grandfather worked as maître d'hôtel at the Brookline Country Club, where he lived during the week.

Significance

The death and move form part of the biographical background to The Bell Jar, whose central themes draw on Plath’s early life. The evidence establishes the loss and its immediate family consequences; it does not, by itself, specify how Plath later remembered or interpreted the event.