Most of all, I can’t shake Hollywood’s infatuation with the book as not just a symbol of depression but perhaps especially the female high school teenager variety of depression.

I certainly come to The Bell Jar with a lot of associations. Salinger, so I feel more confident forming an opinion on this work than on her poetry. I thought The Bell Jar might be a good place for me to start with Plath’s body of work - I’ve read a ton more novels than I’ve read poetry, and I’ve even read my fair share of J.D. It’s also been referred to as a version of The Catcher in the Rye “for girls,” which seems a bit dismissive to me. Besides, describing anything as like a famous book by a man but “for girls” implies that women can’t fully appreciate a coming-of-age novel unless the protagonist and the author are female (and also perhaps suggests that a man would not appreciate a coming-of-age book unless he can identify completely with the lead).

It’s also been referred to as a version of The Catcher in the Rye “for girls,” which seems a bit dismissive to me, in part because The Bell Jar is a novel that even my husband, who ingests books at a much slower clip than I, has read and loved. I blame my inability to weigh in on her writing myself as a symptom of a greater problem of mine: poetry is severely underrepresented in my reading history, and Plath is foremost a poet.īut I’ve always felt particularly embarrassed about never having read Plath- a glaring hole in my education, I presume, since her only published novel, The Bell Jar, has been cited by various publications as a seminal feminist text. People wonder what Plath could have accomplished had she lived past the age of thirty, for she was an ambitious and, so I’ve been told, an extremely talented writer. Sylvia Plath is often evoked as a symbol of tragedy, depression, and a life cut short. Note: Late to the Party is a new Electric Literature series where we ask writers to read an author that, for some reason, they’ve never read. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

The bell jar