The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Summary
Esther Greenwood, a talented college student who wins a coveted summer internship at a New York fashion magazine, arrives expecting the experience to feel like the achievement it should be and instead feels steadily more disconnected from everyone around her, unable to enjoy the parties, the clothes or the ambition she is supposed to want. Back home in Massachusetts after the internship ends, rejected from a writing course she had been counting on, Esther stops sleeping, stops reading and stops being able to write at all, and after a frightening sexual encounter and a badly administered course of electroshock therapy under a doctor she does not trust, she attempts suicide by swallowing sleeping pills in her family's cellar. She survives and is hospitalized, and under the care of a different, more attentive psychiatrist, Doctor Nolan, a properly administered course of shock treatment and insulin therapy slowly brings her back to herself. The novel ends without full resolution, Esther walking into a room of doctors who will decide whether she is ready to leave the hospital and return to college, the bell jar of the title lifted, Plath makes clear, only provisionally and only for now.
Plath writes Esther's descent with an exact, often darkly funny clarity that keeps the prose lucid even as Esther's own perception of the world grows less reliable, and that steadiness is what makes the novel's account of depression feel documentary rather than melodramatic. It reads quickly and stays genuinely unsettling, particularly in how calmly Esther narrates decisions a reader can see are catastrophic before she can.
Heinemann published the novel in Britain on January 14, 1963, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, since Plath drew closely enough on her own 1953 breakdown and hospitalization that she worried about how the people around her, including her mother, would recognize themselves in it.
Historical Context & Significance
Sylvia Plath died by suicide on February 11, 1963, less than a month after The Bell Jar appeared under her pseudonym, and that timing has shaped every reading of the book since; critics have struggled for decades to discuss the novel without reading it as a direct suicide note, a framing the novel was never written to carry alone. No literary prize considered the book on its quiet 1963 British debut, and Harper and Row had earlier rejected the American manuscript outright as disappointing, juvenile and overwrought, a judgment that delayed US publication for eight years.
Plath's mother Aurelia opposed an American edition, wary of how closely its satirized characters resembled real people in Plath's life, and the book did not appear in the United States until 1971, when it became an immediate bestseller. Reviewing that American edition in The New Yorker, Howard Moss noted its black comedy while still calling its manner somewhat girlish, a dismissal that has not aged well. The novel has since been translated into more than forty languages and is now read as a founding text of American confessional fiction, its afterlife entirely disconnected from any prize.