The Bell Jar

​Title: The Bell Jar
Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: Faber
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
My sister gave me a copy of The Bell Jar more years ago than I can remember. On the back of this tattered Faber edition, it says 80p – so there’s a clue. Decades later, I finally read it. It was my intention to write a review of this extraordinary book that could have been written yesterday.
To that end I thought I’d find out a little more 

about Sylvia Plath herself. Knowing only that she had committed suicide and had been married to fellow poet Ted Hughes who turned out to be a bit of a rat, inherited her work after she died and destroyed some of it – there was clearly so much more.  And indeed there is – so I’m afraid I am hi-jacking this ‘review’. Not to tell the bigger Plath story (which has been chronicled many times over), but to look at where this book stands, for me, at this moment in time. For many reasons.
Firstly, because my sisters inscription in the book says ‘Dearest, just because it’s winter here – with warmest love’. I had just moved to Cape Town from London, so it carries a special message.
Secondly because depression and issues around troubled minds seems to be strongly in the ether right now – COVID coincidence? Who knows.
Thirdly because Esther Greenwood in the book has a summer job working at a woman’s magazine – and having spent many years working at one myself, bells were set off – and bells of nostalgia as so many magazines, women’s titles amongst them, have ‘folded’ – a demise maybe accelerated by the pandemic. Again, who knows. But women’s magazines were a world in their own right – maybe one day someone will do a PhD on their significance. Or the significance of their closure. Maybe someone already has.
Fourthly because I just heard that Florence Howes died aged 91. She was the US founder of the Feminist Press back in 1970 – and in her own words started what became ‘….an avalanche of the rediscovery of women writers.’ While Plath has been called ‘one of the most fascinating and tragic women writers of the 20th century, it was her contribution to the ‘confessional poetry movement’ that saw her hailed as an important feminist writer.  Semi- autobiographical, The Bell Jar it seems most certainly has a ‘confessional’ feel to it.
Googling I found that Plath’s mother wanted to block the publishing of The Bell Jar in 1963. Describing the writing of book to her mother she said, ‘What I’ve done is throw together events from my own life – fictionalising to add colour – but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when she is suffering a breakdown.’ She compared her despair to ‘owl’s talons clenching my heart.’
But lastly, no matter the content, some books just get to you because of the way of the writers words. Like ‘It was the day after Christmas and a grey sky bellied over us fat with snow.’ I loved that.
Sylvia Plath died in 1963 aged just 30.