The Bell Jar
Esther Greenwood is a brilliant Massachusetts college student on a summer guest editorship at a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, the season the Rosenbergs are executed, and she cannot feel any of it. As the internship ends and she returns to a Boston suburb that is expected to receive her as a success, her depression tightens, a rejection from a writing program becomes a door she cannot open, and the bell jar of the title settles over her senses. Over the following months, Esther moves through a series of treatment settings, psychiatric wards, electroconvulsive therapy, a progressive private hospital, narrating her own reconstruction in the dry, affectless first person that made the book a touchstone. Sylvia Plath's only novel was published in London in 1963, weeks before her death.
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What you might want to know about The Bell Jar
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a summer guest editorship at a New York magazine, college senior Esther Greenwood goes through dates, parties, and a sense of suffocation she calls the bell jar. She returns to Boston, and the descent gets worse.
Yes, heavily. The Bell Jar (1963) is fictionalized but closely tracks Sylvia Plath's own 1953 mental-health crisis and hospitalization. Plath published the novel under a pseudonym; she died by suicide one month later.
Not yet in the United States. The Bell Jar was published in 1963 and remains under copyright. UK and EU copyright depends on Plath's death year (1963), with terms varying by country.
The Bell Jar was written by Sylvia Plath, published in 1963 by BBC.
The Bell Jar is 258 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Bell Jar takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Bell Jar is a standalone novel by Sylvia Plath, not part of a series.
The Bell Jar is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
