The Bell Jar

Esther Greenwood wins a prestigious internship at a New York magazine in the summer of 1953, the summer the Rosenbergs are executed, and finds herself unable to feel anything about any of it — the glamour, the opportunity, the future everyone has mapped out for her. What follows is a descent into depression and a psychiatric hospitalization rendered with a clinical precision that only someone who has lived it could achieve. Plath published this under a pseudonym in 1963, one month before her death. The novel is not a suicide note — it is a record of a mind in crisis and a devastating critique of the specific suffocation of 1950s American femininity, the way that every available path for a smart, ambitious woman led to the same small room. The most important novel about female depression ever written and the one that most honestly refuses to separate the personal experience of breakdown from the social conditions that produced it. The bell jar descends when the world outside offers nothing worth breathing for.