Reading Order
The Bell Jar Reading Order
The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath is one of the most powerful and influential American novels of the twentieth century — a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman's breakdown, hospitalization, and recovery in 1950s America. Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student who has won a month-long guest editorship at a New York fashion magazine, returns home to Boston at the summer's end and finds herself unable to write, sleep, or function, descending into a depression that leads to a suicide attempt, electroconvulsive therapy, and hospitalization in a series of institutions. The novel ends with Esther's tentative release back into the world — not triumphant, but alive. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England one month before her death by suicide in February 1963; it was not published under her own name until 1967. The pseudonym was partly designed to protect the real people on whom characters were based, but it also reflects the novel's ambivalent relationship to its own autobiographical content: The Bell Jar is not simply a memoir but a shaped, ironized account that uses Esther's voice to expose the contradictions and hypocrisies of 1950s American femininity with extraordinary precision. The period's expectations of women — beautiful, married, maternal, self-effacing — are shown to be incompatible with Esther's ambition, intelligence, and honesty about her own desires, and the breakdown is inseparable from this incompatibility. The novel has become one of the most widely read accounts of depression and mental illness in American literature, and one of the foundational texts of second-wave feminism.
Where to start
The Bell Jar — the novel opens in New York during the Rosenbergs' execution and is compact enough to read in a day or two; it repays re-reading.
Complete The Bell Jar Book List
- 1Buy
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath·1963·The novel — Esther Greenwood's breakdown, hospitalization, and tentative recovery in 1950s America. - 2Buy
Ariel
Sylvia Plath·1965·Plath's final poetry collection — the poems written in the months before her death; the fullest expression of her poetic achievement. - 3Buy
Letters Home
Sylvia Plath·1975·Plath's letters to her mother from college, Cambridge, and after — the biographical context for The Bell Jar's story. - 4Buy
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath·1982·Plath's journals — her interior life and working mind; the raw material from which The Bell Jar was made. - 5Buy
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman·1892·Gilman's short story of a woman driven to madness by the rest cure — the predecessor to The Bell Jar's account of medical treatment and female internment. - 6Buy
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Joanne Greenberg·1964·Greenberg's novel of a young woman's schizophrenia and recovery — the closest contemporary parallel to The Bell Jar. - 7Buy
The Hours
Michael Cunningham·1998·Cunningham's novel interweaving Virginia Woolf, a 1950s housewife, and a 1990s AIDS sufferer — Plath's aesthetic and feminist project extended through Woolf. - 8Buy
Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen·1993·Kaysen's memoir of hospitalization at McLean (the same hospital where Plath was treated) — the direct successor to The Bell Jar's account of female psychiatric experience.
The Bell Jar — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Bell Jar about?
The Bell Jar follows Esther Greenwood, a brilliant Wellesley student who has won a guest editorship at a New York fashion magazine — a version of the Mademoiselle College Board program that Plath participated in. After a month in New York, Esther returns home to Boston and finds herself unable to write, read, or function; she fails to get into a writing program she had counted on, and the depression that follows leads to a suicide attempt, ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) at a state hospital, and eventual transfer to a private institution funded by a wealthy benefactress. The novel ends with Esther's release and her interview with her doctors before returning to college — not triumphant, but alive and tentatively functional.
Is The Bell Jar autobiographical?
The Bell Jar is closely autobiographical — so closely that Plath published it under a pseudonym and her mother tried to prevent American publication after Plath's death, fearing the harm it might do to the real people depicted. Esther Greenwood is Plath herself: the Mademoiselle guest editorship, the suicide attempt and hospitalization (at McLean Hospital), the electroconvulsive therapy, the recovery under the care of a female psychiatrist — all are drawn directly from Plath's own experience in the summer and fall of 1953. The novel transforms this material through the ironizing distance of Esther's voice and through structural choices that give the autobiographical narrative the shape of a parable about 1950s American femininity.
What does the bell jar symbolize in The Bell Jar?
The bell jar is Esther's image for the experience of depression: a glass bell jar dropped over her, trapping her in her own stale air, distorting her view of the world, making the ordinary pleasures and activities of life inaccessible. The image captures both the isolation of depression (the inability to reach or be reached by other people) and its distortion of perception (everything seen through curved glass). Esther uses the image to reflect on her fear that the bell jar might descend again after her recovery: 'How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?' The image has become one of the most widely recognized metaphors for depression in American culture.
What is The Bell Jar's relationship to feminism?
The Bell Jar is one of the foundational texts of second-wave feminism — published in 1963, the same year as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Both books diagnose the same disease: the 1950s American ideal of femininity (beautiful, married, maternal, self-effacing) is not merely unfulfilling but pathogenic — literally making women sick. Esther's breakdown is inseparable from the contradictions of her position: she is brilliant, ambitious, and honest about her own desires in a society that rewards none of these qualities in women. The alternative futures she imagines for herself (the fig tree passage, in which she sees the different lives available to her but can't choose one) is one of the novel's most celebrated passages and the most explicit statement of its feminist argument.
What should I read after The Bell Jar?
After The Bell Jar, readers often turn to Plath's poetry — Ariel (1965) is the essential collection, written in the months before her death; The Colossus (1960) is her first collection. Her journals and Letters Home provide the biographical context. For the tradition of fiction about women's mental illness and psychiatric experience, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) is the key predecessor; Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) is the closest contemporary parallel; and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (1993) is the direct memoir successor. For the broader feminist literary context, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) and Virginia Woolf's essays are essential companions.
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