The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is the only novel by the American poet Sylvia Plath. It first appeared in 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas, with the names of places and people altered.

Esther Greenwood is a student from the Boston suburbs who is chosen for a summer internship at a New York magazine, and the prize turns out to be a month of dinners, parties and free samples that she cannot make herself enjoy. She watches the other girls and cannot be like them, and she notices the gap between her awards and her feelings without being able to close it. Back home, she is turned down for a writing course she had counted on, and her plans come apart. What follows is a slow account of a young woman who stops being able to sleep, to read or to wash, told from inside her own head with unnerving clarity. Plath writes the collapse without drama, in the ordinary detail of appointments, prescriptions and the small humiliations of being treated as a case.

The book was published under Plath's own name for the first time in 1966 and did not appear in the United States until 1971.