DAY 7: AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY...

From 9:00 to 19:00 = 1960 to ? (Postmodernist Period)
Introduction: This is the last day of our Seven Days of Suicide Tour, and we will end it with a bang: The Postmodernist Period. This could be described as the fallout of the Second World War, because the horror and violence of that war had a profound effect on the literature of the age: this literature was filled with black humour, irony, paranoia, fragmentation and the impression of lost innocence. Particularily during the seventies and eighties, the excluded groups of the time (women, racial minorities, etc) were finally brought into the heart of the literary world. The heroine of female writers everywhere was Sylvia Plath, and it is her life and death that will be the climax of this tumultuous tour, which has revolved on something that has been referred to as "The Sylvia Plath Effect." This term describes the tendency of creative writers to suffer from mental disorders, addictions and self-destructive behaviour. So, with no further ado, let us dive into Sylvia Plath's saddest story: her own.
Locations: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) Our first location in this author's life will be her childhood home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, which the family moved to when Plath was only four. The crashing waves of the close by Atlantic Ocean, which we will dip into if the weather is warm, fascinated her from a young age. But it was in this home that a tragic event that traumatised her deeply occurred: her father Otto, who had been suffering from diabetes for years, died a week and a half after her birthday. The same year, Plath's first poem and drawing was published in a Boston newspaper. Throughout the years she attended school, she was awarded scholarships and countless accolades for her budding talent in writing. Sadly, talent was not the only thing that Sylvia was slowly developing...
The second location in her life will be where she attended, and taught at one point: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Although in her youth she appeared to be a relatively carefree student, she struggled with what we now call bipolar disorder or manic depression: frequent extreme mood swings from darkest suicidal depression to euphoric and uncontrollable mania. In the midst of her academic success in Smith College, she experienced her first mental meltdown. Institutions and EST followed. She described her hospitalisation as a "...time of darkness, despair and disillusion -- so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be -- symbolic death, and numb shock -- then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." She tried to kill herself with sleeping pills when she was twenty one, but recovered and lived to graduate summa cum laude.
Cabridge University will be our third location, and where we will eat lunch after once again exploring the enormous library for a couple hours. It was here, while she was at Newnham College, that Sylvia Plath met British poet Ted Hughes. By then, Sylvia had begun to write in earnest, as she would throughout her life. She and Ted married when she was twenty four, but the marriage (although intense) was not a happy one. They had a one daughter, a miscarriage, then a son. Her worsening mental state and Ted Hughes' philandering ways both contributed to their seperation in 1962, and Syliva took the two children with her to...
Our fourth location: a flat (in the house Yeats once lived) at 23 Fitzroy Road, London. This is where, on the morning of the 11th of February 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself by inhaling the gas of her kitchen oven, which led to asphyxiation. Her two children were playing in the next room. She was only thirty years old.
Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire will be our last location on the tour. Here, at the end of a long and fulfilling journey, we will find the gravestone of Plath which reads: "Even admist fierce flames the golden lotus may be planted." Here, in her husband's cemetary, is where we might illegally smuggle in some candles and picnic baskets for dinner. As the sun sets in the cold English sky, we can toast to Sylvia Plath: May her memory never die.

Above: Sylvia Plath

Above: Ted Hughes

Above: The last door Sylvia Plath walked through at 23 Fitzroy Rd, London

Above: The "Hughes" that her husband ordered to be put on the grave is regularily scratched off by fans

DAY 6: OF TWO WARS AND THE WARS WITHIN

Ftom 9:00 until 19:00 = 1914 to 1960

Introduction: This second to last day of our tour will take place in the years between the Victorian and the Postmodernist Periods. This time brings to mind the greats of our language: T.S Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Forster, and (perhaps one of the most famous manic-depressives and suicides in literature) Virginia Woolf. In this period, we see what is easily recognisable as the ascendance of literature as we know it now. But we must forego the introduction to immediately delve into the lives of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway... and their premature deaths.
Locations: The Life and Death of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Our first location will be the Talland House, St Ives, Cornwall: Adeline Virginia Woolf spent every summer here until she was thirteen, and this is the place of her most vivid memories. So vivid, in fact, that the impressions and landscapes found here can also be found littered in her works (The Lighthouse, in particular.) After repeated sexual abuse by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, and the deaths of both parents and a sister which led to two consequent nervous breakdowns, Virginia moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury: our second location. While she stayed there, she attended King's College, Cambridge. It was there that she found a group of friends, and one close friend in particular: a man called Leondard Woolf. She married him two years after meeting him, and they shared a close and intimate marriage. They even started a publishing company together. But the encouragement of her husband couldn't save this talented woman from her inner demons: her periodic depression and hypermania drove her to frequent breakdowns...and a lot of writing. Our final destination in her life will be her home in Rodmell, Sussex. It was here on the morning of 28 March 1941 that Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with stones, left a letter to her husband, and then drowned herself in the River Ouse. Here, while sitting on the green banks of the river, we can eat lunch and imagine the depths of despair into which this genius of literature plummeted.

Above: Virginia Woolf

Above: A map of the area that Virginia Woolf must've once explored

Above: Virginia and Leonard Woolf

2. The Life and Death of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) This writer was born in Oak Park, Illonois (Chicago): this upper-class, strictly Protestant suburb will be our first location. As a young boy, and all through his long life, Hemingway had an eye for adventure... always in some scrape or other. This spirit led him all over the globe: New York, Italy, Paris, Toronto, Chicago, Kansas City, Nairobi, Kenya, the Bahamas, Cuba, Spain and finally Idaho. So many locations that his presence was felt... so many memorials left where his heavy foot trod... why not visit all of 'em? We will go on a wild, wacky and wonderful worldwide tour of every strange place that Ernest Hemingway visited, wrote and got (greviously) injured! This will undoubtedly exhaust us... but perhaps we can handle one more location: where he committed suicide. Two days after being released from hospital after his first attempt, and five bouts of EST (Electroshock Therapy), he grabbed a gun from the cabinet in his home in Ketchum, Idaho and shot himself. So ended the eventful life of Ernest Hemingway: alcoholic, writer, American, adventurer, and sorely missed by his fans.

Above: Ernest Hemingway with his favourite shotgun that he used for hunting... and to kill himself.

DAY 4: QUOTH THE RAVEN, "NEVERMORE."

From 9:00 to 19:00 = 11798-1832 (Romantic Period)

Introduction: This explosive period in literature, which happens to be my favourite, was a direct and intense reaction to the "sensibility" and "rationalism" of the Age of Enlightenment. Writers in this period gloried in the beauty of wild, untamed and pure nature... and in the complexities of the human mind itself. Sometimes dark, always emotional and very evocative. Ah, this time period was passion: raw, painful and sometimes self-destructive passion. Everything in the arts, if it be musical or artistic or literary, was intense. And this intensity, which is most pronounced in the gifted, could push some over the edge...

Locations: The Life and Death of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) What Romantic tour would be complete without him! He is the perfect example of the tortured genius. Our first location will be where he was born in 1809: Carver Street, Boston, Massachusets (yes, he was American). His father abandoned the family when Poe was one, and his mother died of consumption (TB) when he was two. In this location, a museum for him (like in many places he lived in) has been built. The second location we visit will be the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, where Poe started studying languages in 1826. At that time, the university was in total chaos, with a high dropout rate. Poe's gambling debts and excessive drinking finally caught up with him: having no money for schooling, he left after attending for one year. It's here that we can grab lunch. Sadly, for the next location we must fast-forward over his troubled and anguished life (which included time in the army, lost love, family deaths, writing, more debt, disownment, court-martialling, more death, alcohilism, incest, popularity, two marriages and an engagement, and penury) to the streets of Baltimore. It was on those streets, in October of 1839, that Poe was found delirious and incoherent... and not in his own clothes. There is a memorial where he was found. Our last location in his life will be, strangely, where he died: Washington College Hospital on Broadway and Fayette Street. Many theories exist on the causes of death: suicide, murder, delerium tremens (caused by alcohol), heart disease, epilepsy, meningeal inflammmation and rabies. We can eat supper at the Raven's Perch along the same road that the great Edgar Allan Poe breathed his last, and discuss the links between the literature and art of the Romantic Period.

Above: Edgar Allan Poe suffered from Manic Depression

Above: Edgar Allan Poe's Birth Memorial

Above: The Memorial in Baltimore