Who wrote the novel 'The Bell Jar'?

Sylvia Plath wrote the novel The Bell Jar. First published in 1963, it is a semi-autobiographical account of Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman whose ambitions and identity become increasingly strained as she experiences depression and a mental-health crisis. The novel portrays the pressures placed on women in 1950s America, including expectations surrounding achievement, sexuality, marriage, and domestic life.

Plath initially published the book in the United Kingdom under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It appeared under her own name in Britain in 1966 and was not published in the United States until 1971, after her death. The novel’s autobiographical elements are substantial, but Esther is a fictional character, so The Bell Jar should not be treated as Plath’s autobiography.

The title image suggests emotional suffocation and separation from the world. The book is often classified as a roman à clef because fictional events and characters echo aspects of Plath’s life. Readers sometimes confuse it with Plath’s poetry collection Ariel, which was published posthumously in 1965. The Bell Jar remains her only completed novel and is widely regarded as a major twentieth-century work of English-language fiction.