Novel
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
Synopsis
Summer 1953. Esther Greenwood, a student from the suburbs of Boston, has won a prize that gives her a month in New York as a guest editor on a women's magazine, lodged with other girls in a hotel for women. Receptions, fittings and dates leave her empty. Back home with her mother, she learns that she has not been admitted to the writing course she had hoped for, stops sleeping, reading and writing, and her mother takes her to a psychiatrist.
Context
The book appeared in London in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, a month before its author's death: she feared hurting recognisable people and wanted a poor reception not to reflect on her poetry. It was reissued under her own name in England in 1966, and was published in the United States only in 1971, her mother having opposed it. The material is that of a summer in New York and a hospitalisation that the author had experienced ten years earlier. A woman who had recognised herself in a character sued the producers of the 1979 film; the case was settled in 1987.
Who it is for
A short novel, in the first person. It deals head-on with depression and psychiatric confinement, and several passages are hard to read.
Prizes and reception
The only novel by its author, first published under a pseudonym, then brought to the screen in 1979 by Larry Peerce.