Where to Start with Sylvia Plath: A Reading Guide

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) is one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century — the central figure of the confessional school, alongside Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton — and the author of The Bell Jar (1963), one of the most widely read and most honest novels about depression in the American tradition. She died by suicide at thirty, leaving behind two collections of poetry (The Colossus, 1960; Ariel, 1965), one novel, journals, letters, and a body of work that has grown steadily in critical standing since her death. She studied at Smith College on a scholarship, won a Fulbright to Cambridge where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes, and spent her final years in Devon and London writing the poems that would establish her reputation.

Where to Start: The Bell Jar (1963)

The essential starting point for most readers — the novel published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas six weeks before Plath’s death. Esther Greenwood is twenty, on scholarship, exceptional, and in New York for a summer internship at a fashion magazine — exactly the life she is supposed to want, and the life from which she feels entirely disconnected. Back at home, rejected from a writing course she had counted on, she descends.

Plath writes depression from the inside with a precision that has made The Bell Jar one of the most recognized accounts of mental illness in literature. The bell jar of the title is the depression itself — a glass jar dropped over Esther, trapping her in her own stale air. The novel is semi-autobiographical (Plath suffered a similar breakdown in 1953) and its power comes partly from the distance the fiction allows: Esther Greenwood can be examined more coldly, and more completely, than Plath could examine herself.

Ariel (1965)

The poetry collection on which Plath’s reputation most securely rests — written in a burst of productivity in the autumn and early winter of 1962, after Ted Hughes left her for another woman and she moved alone with their children to a London flat. The poems are formally meticulous and emotionally extreme: they use tight stanzas, driving rhythms, and precise imagery to contain rage, exhilaration, and a kind of dark joy that is unlike anything else in twentieth-century poetry.

The most celebrated poems — ‘Lady Lazarus’ (‘Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well’), ‘Daddy,’ ‘Edge,’ ‘Ariel’ — have entered the canon; they are also, rereading them, better technically than their reputation suggests. The 2004 restored edition reflects the ordering Plath intended, with poems Ted Hughes excluded restored to their place.

Why The Bell Jar Is the Ideal First Book

For a reader new to Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar is the ideal first book because it is her only novel, a celebrated and powerful work, and an accessible entry into her intense exploration of the inner life and psychological experience. The Bell Jar follows a gifted young woman through a summer in New York and her subsequent descent into psychological breakdown, rendering the experience of depression and the pressures on a young woman with unflinching power and dark wit. As an entry point, it offers an accessible and powerful expression of Plath’s gifts, the unflinching exploration of the inner life and psychological experience, the rendering of female experience, and the intense, honest voice. It welcomes the newcomer with its compelling story, its psychological power, and its dark wit, drawing the reader into Plath’s intense vision. It is her only novel and a fine, accessible representation of her gifts, so that the new reader encounters Plath in her most approachable form. For the newcomer, then, The Bell Jar is the natural and ideal starting point.

What to Expect as a New Reader

As a new reader, you can expect The Bell Jar to be a powerful, unflinching, and darkly witty novel of a young woman’s psychological experience. You can expect an unflinching exploration of the inner life, for the novel renders the experience of psychological breakdown and depression with intensity, honesty, and precision. You can expect a compelling story, for the novel follows a gifted young woman through a summer in New York and her subsequent descent into psychological crisis. You can expect a rendering of female experience, for the novel attends to the pressures, expectations, and constraints faced by a talented young woman of her time. You can expect dark wit, for the novel is marked by a sharp, mordant humor alongside its painful material. You should be aware that the novel confronts difficult subject matter, including depression and psychological crisis, handled with honesty. Expect, in short, a powerful, unflinching, and darkly witty novel of a young woman’s psychological experience, an accessible and affecting introduction to Plath.

Going Deeper After Your First Book

Once The Bell Jar has introduced you to Plath’s intense vision, the reader who wishes to go deeper can turn to her poetry, which represents the heart of her achievement and the fullest expression of her genius. Her poetry, particularly the work of her final period, achieves an intensity, power, and confrontational honesty that have made her one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, exploring psychological anguish, female experience, and the extremities of the self with extraordinary force. Reading her poetry after The Bell Jar deepens your appreciation of Plath’s distinctive gifts, the unflinching exploration of the inner life, the intense and honest voice, and the rendering of psychological experience that mark her work. It is worth engaging with her poetry on its own terms, attending to its artistry as well as its personal intensity, rather than reading it only through the lens of her life. Building your reading journey through Plath’s work is a matter of moving from her accessible novel into her powerful poetry. The reader who begins with The Bell Jar and continues into her poetry will encounter one of the most powerful and influential writers of the twentieth century.

Reading Sylvia Plath

Plath is one of the writers whose biography is most easily confused with her work — the circumstances of her death, her marriage to Hughes, the feminist reclamation of her legacy — and the best approach is to read the work first and the biography second. The Bell Jar and Ariel are the foundations; after those, her journals (particularly the unabridged edition) and the two volumes of letters give the fullest picture of a writer of extraordinary ambition and technical commitment who produced her best work in the last eighteen months of her life.