Set in the 1950s, it is clear that little is expected in the way of career success for Esther. Esther is both fragile and an intellectual and although she is studying under a scholarship awarded in the name of a woman poet, she receives several academic and professional disappointments. Its central character and narrator is Esther Greenwood whom we first meet in New York City, on an internship at a magazine. The Bell Jar is considered largely autobiographical. Plath had had a history of depression, however, and had made several attempts at suicide. She had already separated from Hughes by this time (following an extra-marital affair that he had) and her two children were very young. The Bell Jar was published under a pseudonym in January 1963, just a few weeks before Plath took her own life at the age of thirty. My university-age daughter read it a while ago and gave me a copy for Christmas. I have also read quite a bit of Ted Hughes’s work over the years too, so I’m slightly puzzled as to why it has never occurred to me to pick up Plath’s only, but still iconic novel. I read quite a bit of Sylvia Plath’s poetry when I was a teenager having been exposed to some of her work at school. I honestly don’t know why I have never read The Bell Jar.
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