The Bell Jar
Although the THE BELL JAR is listed as fiction by its publisher, Sylvia Plath herself said it was written "...as an autobiographical apprentice work...to free myself from the past." Esther, her main character, likewise frees herself from the past, following several attempts at suicide and the numerous shock treatments at a mental institution.
Esther lives in a New York hotel with twelve other girls her age who had all won a fashion magazine contest. Their social lives in the evening are more or less free, but Esther regrets going out on blind dates which always fizzle out. And her only thoughts about marriage involve the Willard boy whose mother considers them a good match.
But Buddy Willard admits he's had sex with other girls, and Esther wants to catch up. She tries to seduce a foreign man involved with the UN, but when that fails, she goes to the roof of her hotel and throws all her clothes down into the streets. Then she gives up several scholarships and returns home to her mother.
While her mother is at work, Esther has time to contemplate suicide. But she learns that her body, "...had all sorts of little tricks...which would save it..." Finally her intentions become too obvious and she is taken to a mental hospital.
While undergoing treatment there, she meets Joan, another patient she had known in school, who also had gone on dates with Buddy Willard. One night on a pass from the hospital, Esther loses her virginity to a college professor and goes to Joan for help. Soon after, however, Joan hangs herself outside the hospital. And this causes Buddy to ask Esther, "Do you think there's something in me that drives women crazy?"
THE BELL JAR ends when Esther is released from the hospital. But Sylvia Plath's escape from her own "bell jar" didn't last too long. She married a poet in London, had two children, and had some of her poetry published. But several weeks after THE BELL JAR was put into print, she committed suicide herself.
Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR vividly tells her experiences as a suicide victim, which the NEW YORK TIMES describes as "clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing..." THE BELL JAR was first published in London in 1963.