Sylvia Plath's only novel first appeared under the name Victoria Lucas
In 1963 a British publisher released a novel about a gifted student who wins a glamorous New York magazine internship and then slides into depression. Its author was listed as Victoria Lucas. Only in 1966 did The Bell Jar carry Sylvia Plath's real name, and Americans waited until 1971 to read it.
The book is widely treated as a thinly veiled account of Plath's own life, with people and places renamed. Esther Greenwood, a 19-year-old from the Boston suburbs studying on a scholarship funded by a wealthy novelist, spends the summer of 1953 as a guest editor at the fictional Ladies' Day, living in a women's hotel. Everyone around her seems thrilled by fashion and city life. Esther feels mostly anxiety and a strange numbness, and on her last night she flings her new wardrobe off the hotel roof.
Home in Massachusetts with her widowed mother, she learns she has been turned down for a coveted writing course. The options laid out for women, motherhood like her endlessly pregnant neighbour or secretarial work, repel her, and she stops sleeping. A self-absorbed psychiatrist gives her badly administered shock treatment, which terrifies rather than helps her, and she attempts suicide.
Her recovery begins at a private hospital paid for by her benefactor, under Dr. Nolan, the first woman Esther feels she can truly talk to. Treatment there, properly supervised, finally lifts what she describes as a bell jar pressing down on her, leaving her gasping inside stale air. Along the way she rejects the idea that she must marry her hometown boyfriend Buddy, a medical student who wants a wife like his mother. The book closes with Esther walking into a meeting where doctors will decide whether she may return to college.
Plath died by suicide a month after the novel came out in Britain. Her husband Ted Hughes and her mother Aurelia both wanted American publication delayed, but once it arrived it sold out fast there and now exists in more than forty languages.
Source: The Bell Jar
