Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist whose autobiographical novel The Bell Jar has become a landmark account of depression, identity, and the pressures on women.

Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, just weeks before her death by suicide at thirty. The novel draws closely on her own psychiatric breakdown and hospitalisation at nineteen, following her attempt to take her life during a prestigious internship in New York. Esther Greenwood, the protagonist, is Plath’s most direct literary self-portrait: a brilliant, ambitious young woman who finds herself suffocating under the expectations of early 1950s American femininity while simultaneously sliding into a depression she cannot name or control.

The Bell Jar is not a comfortable book, and it was not meant to be. Plath writes about electroconvulsive therapy, suicide attempts, and institutional psychiatry with a clinical precision that reflects both her own experience and her characteristic refusal to aestheticize suffering into something palatable. The prose is sharp, sardonic, and occasionally very funny — Plath’s wit is one of the book’s underappreciated qualities — and the social critique of women’s options in postwar America is incisive. The novel has been criticized, occasionally, for its treatment of race, which reflects the limited perspective of its era and its narrator.

Plath is one of those writers around whom biography and myth have accumulated so densely that it can be hard to read the work itself. The Bell Jar rewards that effort. It remains one of the most precise and unflinching accounts of depression in American literature, and its portrait of the pressures that constrain young women has lost little of its relevance.