The 1963 novel by Sylvia Plath banned for its depiction of mental illness and suicide is The Bell Jar.
Published in the United Kingdom under Plath’s pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the novel follows Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman whose depression deepens after an internship in New York. Its account of psychiatric treatment, alienation, and a suicide attempt drew partly on Plath’s own breakdown and recovery. The novel’s title metaphor describes Esther’s feeling of being trapped beneath an invisible, suffocating glass dome.
The Bell Jar has been challenged or removed from schools and libraries for reasons including profanity, sexual material, suicide, and its frank portrayal of mental illness. A well-known 1977 challenge in Indiana led to the book’s removal from a high-school literature course. Readers sometimes confuse it with The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s earlier story about psychological confinement, but that is not Plath’s novel. Plath died by suicide in 1963, shortly after the novel’s American publication.