The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Summary
Ambitious college student Esther Greenwood spends a summer interning at a New York magazine, her outward success masking a mounting depression that deepens into a suicide attempt and a harrowing stay in a psychiatric hospital back home. Plath draws closely on her own breakdown and hospitalization to render Esther's unraveling with unflinching clarity, refusing to sentimentalize either her illness or her recovery. The novel has become a defining text about mental illness and the suffocating expectations placed on ambitious young women in midcentury America.
Historical Context & Significance
No major literary prize recognized the novel on its initial British publication under a pseudonym in January 1963. Plath died by suicide only a month after the book appeared, and it was not published under her own name in the United States until years later.