The bell jar

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath--

The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Sylvia Plath about a woman on the verge of insanity. This novel was written in 1963 with the intention of showing readers what it was like to be a woman at that point in history. A bell jar is literally “a bell-shaped glass cover used for covering delicate objects.” The main character in The Bell Jar is a young college student named Esther Greenwood, who goes to New York to work as a magazine guest editor for a month. She goes through many suicide attempts during the course of the novel, and is hospitalized. She was led to these suicide attempts by thoughts she had after she left New York and the trauma caused by the events that happened while she was there. Sylvia Plath based this story off of her actual life story.