‌When a female author dies by suicide, it defines her. From Virginia Woolf to Sarah Kane, everything they did, everything they made during their life becomes part of a death-drive narrative. Everything they wrote gets automatically connected with death and critics even find death symbols in every single work of theirs.
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‌Woolf's novels and Kane's plays are called as being indications of mental illness, while Dylan Thomas's poetry is 'excellent' despite, rather than because of, his alcoholism and troubled life.
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‌The traditional analysis gives too much focus on the writer's life rather than the art form. Chief among those female artists who have become defined by their suicide is the US poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who died on 11 February 1963. Her works have become a symbol of rebellious but depressed young women as evidenced by their impression in pop-culture settings. Plath has become a raw symbol of the girl outsider who dismisses traditional standards of womanhood to take her life, and death, into her own hands.
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‌ The impact of this understanding's proliferation is to devalue women's engagements with Plath. But the truth is that Plath was one of the first authors to tap into the raw reality of being a woman. Before feminism's second wave and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Plath wrote of her dissatisfaction with a woman's secondary place, her sexual urges, and how these pressures affected her mental health.
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The problem we face with Plath is that the interplay of her life and death has made it difficult to unravel her art from that – but also know who the "real" Sylvia Plath was, in any case.

Source:BBC