[The Bell Jar] is not really a good novel, although extremely promising as first novels go. It is clever and polka-dotted with sharply effective vignettes. It is also highly autobiographical, and at the same time, since it represents the views of a girl enduring a bout of mental illness, dishonest. Plath never solved the problem of providing the reader with clues to the objective reality of episodes reported through the consciousness of a deranged narrator.

Phoebe-Lou Adams, "Life & Letters: 'The Bell Jar'," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1971, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), Vol. 227, No. 5, May, 1971, p. 114.