Sylvia Plath's life runs from Boston, where she was born in 1932, through Smith College and on to Newnham College at Cambridge, where her early writing took shape. The film traces her rise as a poet through The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, and follows The Bell Jar, the semi-autobiographical novel she published under a pseudonym just before her death. It covers the end of her life on February 11, 1963, and the decades of argument that followed over how to read both her death and her work. The Collected Poems, assembled in 1981 from previously unpublished material, is given particular weight: it won Plath the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth poet to receive the award posthumously. The film treats her as a central figure in confessional poetry, a style built on writing directly from private crisis, and uses her academic record and publishing history to track how a short career produced work still fought over by scholars and general readers alike.