The Bell Jar (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Sylvia Plath
- First Published: 1963
- Type of Work: Novel
- 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
In The Bell Jar, the veil of fiction over the story of Plath's own life is so thin that her mother fought its publication in the United States, writing to Harper & Row that “practically every character represents someone—often in caricature—whom Sylvia loved; each person had given freely of time, thought, affection, and, in one case, financial help during those agonizing six months of breakdown in 1953.” Nevertheless, the story has the appeal of the novel, and it uses the conventions of fiction in the structuring of the experience it narrates.
The heroine,...
[The entire page is 1873 words long]
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