The Bell Jar

• Study Guide
• Group

The Bell Jar (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)

Form and Content

From the first page of The Bell Jar, with Esther Greenwood describing a day in New York City during the summer of 1952, when she is a guest-editor of Mademoiselle magazine, author Sylvia Plath vividly re-creates the perspective of a depressed, highly intelligent, sensitive young woman who feels herself losing contact with reality. This oppressively introspective atmosphere is relieved, however, by Esther’s sardonic and incisive insights into life’s unfairness and the often-amusing accounts of her own gauche experiences.

Esther has spent...

[The entire page is 2526 words long]

Navigate

• The Bell Jar (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
• The Bell Jar (Identities and Issues in Literature)
• The Bell Jar (Magill Book Reviews)
• The Bell Jar (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
• The Bell Jar (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)
• The Bell Jar (Cyclopedia of Literary Places)
• The Bell Jar (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
• The Bell Jar (The Sixties in America)

See Also:

• Sylvia Plath (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
• Sylvia Plath (Poetry)
• Sylvia Plath (Short Fiction)
• Sylvia Plath (Dictionary of World Biography)
• Sylvia Plath (Identities and Issues)
• Sylvia Plath (Women’s Issues)

See Also:

• - The Bell Jar summary and study guide in the eNotes.