The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel. Renowned for its intensity and outstandingly vivid prose, it broke existing boundaries between fiction and reality and helped to make Plath an enduring feminist icon. It was published under a pseudonym a few weeks before the author's suicide. 'It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems . . . The world in which the events of the novel take place is a world bounded by the Cold War...
Sixty-five years ago today, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes met at a party in Cambridge. Their connection was immediate, powerful, and violent—a portent of their future together. Almost exactly seven years later Plath would die by suicide.