The Bell Jar (Identities and Issues in Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Sylvia Plath
- First Published: 1963
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Autobiographical fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., Self-discovery, United States or Americans, Journalism or journalists, Parents and children, Sex or sexuality, Suicide, Gender roles, Authors or writers, New York City, Poetry or poets, Mental illness, College life, Reality, Women’s issues, Women, Mental institutions, hospitals or asylums, Psychiatry or psychiatrists
- Locales: New York, NY, Boston, MA, New England
The Work
Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas a month prior to her death by suicide. The Bell Jar, her novel, and The Colossus (1960), a book of her poetry, came to life before she ended hers. Plath’s successive publications were posthumous. Plath portends her suicide in The Bell Jar, which recounts an earlier suicide attempt. The novel is an autobiographical account of Plath’s early life as a college student who is elected to spend the summer in New York as a guest writer for a women’s magazine. Her encounters...
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