Sylvia Plath, a major American poet and fiction writer, was born on 27 October 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, and spent her early childhood in the nearby seaport town of Winthrop.

Her father, Dr Otto Emil Plath (1885-1940), was a professor of German and Entomology at Boston University. He was of German descent, and had emigrated to the US from Poland as a teenager. Her mother, Aurelia Schober (1906-1994), was born in Boston of Austrian parents. She studied English and German at Boston University.

Her father's death in 1940 (and a troubled relationship with her mother) cast a profound shadow that disturbed Plath for the rest of her life. At the age of 8 she moved with her mother and younger brother to Wellesley, a suburb of Boston, where she developed a strong interest in writing and drawing. At that young age, the publication of her first poem in the Boston Sunday Herald made Plath decide that she wanted to be a writer. Winning first prize in a Boston Globe competition for a news story and first prize in an Atlantic Monthly competition for fiction confirmed her determination. She was to write more than fifty short stories in her lifetime.

Although she excelled at school and appeared to be a happy, popular student, her perfectionist nature could never be satisfied. She once wrote to her mother: 'I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God". Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be - perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.' (Letters Home, 1950-63.) This destructive energy was to characterise her later poetic writings.

While she was still at school, Sylvia's short story 'And Summer Will Not Come Again' appeared in Seventeen magazine (August 1950). Shortly afterwards, the magazine published her story 'Den of Lions' and her poem 'Ode on a Bitten Plum'. Soon her literary work began appearing in other publications: Harper's Weekly, the National Poetry Association Anthology and the Christian Science Monitor.

In 1950 she won a scholarship to study English at Smith College, an all-girls school in Northampton, Massachusetts. During her college years, she wrote some 400 poems. In 1952, Plath won a fiction-writing competition in Mademoiselle magazine, and the following summer she was offered a guest editorship with the magazine in New York.

She returned to Boston exhausted and depressed. Rejected for a fiction-writing class at Harvard summer school, her depression and sense of failure intensified. Shortly afterwards she suffered from severe psychological depression. An attempted suicide temporarily interrupted her studies. Recovering her strength, however, Plath soon returned to her writing.

Plath successful completed her college career in 1955, winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University, England, where she met and married the English poet Ted Hughes. Her first volume of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in 1960. A daughter (1960) and son (1962) were born before the couple separated. Sylvia Plath ended her life on 11 February 1963, aged 31.

Plath's only novel, the haunting and somewhat autobiographical The Bell Jar, was published shortly before her death. Three volumes of intensely emotional introspective poetry were published posthumously: Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1971). Plath's short stories written between 1950 and 1962 were collected and published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977). Her Collected Poems (1981) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sylvia Plath's Journals were published in 1982.

'Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit' (1955)

Plath recalls growing up in Winthrop, Massachusetts when she was 10. The cosy, innocent, perfect world of her childhood comes to an abrupt end with an unbearable realisation that in the real world you can be victimised and betrayed. Plath craved popularity and personal success, and despaired when she could not achieve them perfectly.

the poet Claire Pollard concludes in the television programme: 'If everything is not perfect then it is awful, and Sylvia couldn't really settle for being in the middle.' That is the 'difference' that Sylvia Plath discovered, and clearly she chose that concluding word with great care to mark how the world would never be the same for her again.

This short story was published in the collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977).