"The Bell Jar" is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath's 20th year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems—the kind of book [J. D.] Salinger's Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell….

"The Bell Jar" is about the way this country was in the nineteen-fifties and about the way it is to lose one's grip on sanity and recover it again….

To Esther madness is the descent of a stifling bell jar over her head….

The world in which the events of this novel take place is a world bounded by the cold war on one side and the sexual war on the other. We follow Esther Greenwood's personal life from her summer job in New...