The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)

In 1953, nineteen year old Esther Greenwood confronts an overwhelming world.

Book Review: The Bell Jar is an amazing book, much more than even its author thought it could be. While she and husband Ted Hughes thought of it as a "potboiler" (written simply for money by appealing to common taste), Plath's writing, insights, and intelligence make it necessary. I first read it when I was about 13, and wondered if I would now find it too simple or juvenile, but found just the opposite. This book was far ahead of its time; it's bewildering that it could've been written in 1963. Written when emotional problems were kept private and secret, the focus on mental health fits with many books written today, and the description of depression and confusion are accurate and affecting: "I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle." Class conflict occurs: Esther is a "scholarship student" surrounded by posh girls, "bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil." Although The Bell Jar was released the same year as The Feminine Mystique (which signaled the second struggle for women's rights in America), Esther Greenwood determinedly asserts herself as a woman: "I thought it sounded like just the sort of drug a man would invent ... the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again"; "The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own letters"; "I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to live a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life." The writing is alive and steadily evocative, the humor is dark and biting, intelligence informs every line. As in her poetry, Plath's vision of semiotics finds elements of Esther's life reflected in the events of the time. The brilliant first sentence foreshadows everything: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." Later one of her wealthy friends states: "It's awful such people should be alive." The Bell Jar is the best book I've read in a long time, combining a defiant story with a stinging slap of emotion.  [5★]