Sylvia Plath’s only novel is said to be (semi-)autobiographical, and with The Bell Jar written in the first person it was just near-impossible for me to detach Sylvia Plath from protagonist Esther Greenwood. In the novel, Esther, an A-student from Boston in her twenties, wins an editorship at a fashion magazine in New York in the summer of 1953. The story begins harmlessly, with comic episodes, but soon turns to darker alleys, as Esther comes home from the summer and questions her worth. She cannot see anything significant or interesting in her future, and tries to find ways to kill herself.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide and died at the age of 30, shortly after the publication of her novel. (Her husband Ted Hughes’ second wife also committed suicide, and also took her young daughter’s life.) Forty-six years later, Sylvia and Ted’s son, Nicholas Hughes, who was only a baby when his mother put her head in the oven in the next room, hanged himself in 2009.
Esther survives, but she’s only an episode in Sylvia Plath’s life. Who knows what she might have done, the moment she stepped off the page?
The Mighty Reading List!
Feast for Crows
The Kobayashi Maru of Love
Showbiz Lengua
PGS Horror issue
Floating Dragon
El Bimbo Variations
The Tesseract
Faithful Place
Moxyland
Zoo City
The Dispossessed
Our Story Begins
Glass Soup
Here on Earth
The Pull of the Moon
Little Bee
Story Quarterly Issue 44
The Bell Jar
Eliza Victoria 