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Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity.

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic. (less)

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Esther Greenwood, a young woman from the suburbs of Boston, gains a summer internship at a prominent magazine in New York City, under editor Jay Cee; however, Esther is neither stimulated nor excited by either the big city or the glamorous culture and lifestyle that girls her age are expected to idolize and emulate. She instead finds her experience to be frightening and disorienting; appreciating the witty sarcasm and adventurousness of her friend Doreen, but also identifying with the piety of Betsy (dubbed "Pollyanna Cowgirl"), a "goody-goody" sorority girl who always does the right thing. She has a benefactress in Philomena Guinea, a formerly successful fiction writer (based on Olive Higgins Prouty), who will later pay some of Esther's hospital expenses.

Esther describes in detail several seriocomic incidents that occur during her internship, kicked off by an unfortunate but amusing experience at a banquet for the girls held by the staff of Ladies' Day magazine. She reminisces about her friend Buddy, whom she has dated more or less seriously, and who considers himself her de facto fiancé. She also muses about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who are scheduled for execution. She returns to her Massachusetts home in low spirits. She has been hoping for another scholarly opportunity once she is back in Massachusetts, a writing course taught by a world-famous author, but on her return her mother immediately tells her she was not accepted for the course. She decides to spend the summer potentially writing a novel, although she feels she lacks enough life experience to write convincingly. All of her identity has been centered upon doing well academically; she is unsure of what to make of her life once she leaves school, and none of the choices presented to her (motherhood, as exemplified by the vacuous, prolific child-bearer Dodo Conway, or stereotypical female careers such as stenography) appeal to her.

Esther becomes increasingly depressed, and finds herself unable to sleep. Her mother encourages, or perhaps forces, her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, whom Esther mistrusts because he is attractive and seems to be showing off a picture of his charming family rather than listening to her. He prescribes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); and afterward, she tells her mother that she will not go back.

Esther's mental state worsens; describing her depression as a feeling of being trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath. She makes several half-hearted attempts at suicide, including swimming far out to sea, before making a serious attempt. She leaves a note saying she is taking a long walk, then crawls into the cellars and swallows about 50 sleeping pills that had been prescribed for her insomnia. In a very dramatic episode, the newspapers presume her kidnapping and death, but she is discovered under her house after an indeterminate amount of time. She survives and is sent to a different mental hospital, where she meets Dr. Nolan, a female therapist. Along with regular psychotherapy sessions, Esther is given huge amounts of insulin to produce a "reaction," and again receives shock treatments, with Dr. Nolan ensuring that they are being properly administered. Esther describes the ECT as beneficial in that it has a sort of antidepressant effect; it lifts the metaphorical bell jar in which she has felt trapped and stifled. Her stay at the private institution is funded by her benefactress, Philomena Guinea.

Esther tells Dr. Nolan how she envies the freedom that men have and how she, as a woman, worries about getting pregnant. Dr. Nolan refers her to a doctor who fits her for a diaphragm. Esther now feels free from her fears about the consequences of sex; free from previous pressures to get married, potentially to the wrong man. Under Dr. Nolan, Esther improves and various life-changing events helps her regain her sanity. The novel ends with her entering the room for an interview, which will decide whether she can leave the hospital.

It is suggested near the beginning of the novel that, in later years, Esther goes on to have a baby.

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The main character Janie Crawford, an African-American woman in her early forties, tells the story of her life via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. Readers receive the story of her life in three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men.
The flashback in the book begins with Janie's sexual awakening which she compares to a pear blossom in spring. Not long after, Janie allows a local boy, Johnny Taylor, to kiss her, which Janie's grandmother, Nanny, witnesses.
Nanny is an elderly woman who, as a slave, was raped by her owner and gave birth to a mixed-race daughter Leafy. Nanny escaped from her jealous mistress and found a good home after the end of the American Civil War. Nanny tried to create a good life for her daughter, but Leafy was raped by her school teacher and became pregnant with Janie. Shortly after Janie's birth, Leafy began to drink and stay out at night. Eventually, she ran away, leaving her daughter Janie with Nanny.
Nanny, afraid for Janie's life to follow Leafy's or her own, transfers all the hopes she had for Leafy to Janie and arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older farmer looking for a wife. Although Janie is not interested in either Logan or marriage, her grandmother wants her to have the stability she never had: legal marriage to Killicks, Nanny thinks, will give Janie opportunities. Nanny feels that Janie will be unable to take care of herself so she must marry a man who will take care of her.[11]
Janie's image of the pear tree causes her to imagine that marriage must involve love—in Janie's pear tree scene, she sees bees pollinating a pear tree and believes that marriage is the human equivalent to this natural process. However, Killicks wants a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner; he thinks Janie does not do enough around the farm and that she is ungrateful. Janie speaks to Nanny about how she feels, but Nanny, too, accuses her of being spoiled. And so, Janie's idea of the pear tree is tarnished. Soon afterward, Nanny dies.
Unhappy, disillusioned, and lonely, Janie chooses to leave Killicks and runs off with the glib Jody (Joe) Starks, who takes her to Eatonville, Florida. Finding the small town residents unambitious, Starks arranges to buy more land, establishes a general store which he has built by local residents, and is soon elected as mayor of the town. Janie soon realises that Starks wants her as a trophy wife, to reinforce his powerful position in town. He asks her to run the store but forbids her from participating in the substantial social life that occurs on the store's front porch. He treats her as his property, controlling what she wears and says, and criticizes her mistakes. He also begins to strike her occasionally. As time passes, he teases her in public about being old, even though she is only in her thirties.
Eventually, she cannot bear it and snaps back at Joe to look at himself. Starks hits her as hard as he can. Later, he gets sick, and refuses to let Janie see him. He does not realize that he has a failing kidney, a likely fatal illness. When Janie learns that he might die, she goes to talk to him. She tells him who she really is and says that he never knew because he would not let her be free.
After Starks dies, Janie becomes financially independent through his estate. She is beset with suitors, some of whom are men of some means or have prestigious occupations, and all of whom she turns down. She meets a young drifter and gambler named Vergible Woods who goes by the name "Tea Cake". Tea Cake plays the guitar for her and initially treats her with kindness and respect. At first Janie is doubtful of his affections, as she is older and has wealth, but eventually falls in love with him.
Deciding to run away with him, Janie has a friend look after the store, and the two head to Jacksonville to marry. They move to the Everglades region ("the muck") where they find work planting and harvesting beans. While their relationship has its ups and downs, including mutual bouts of jealousy and an episode in which Tea Cake whips Janie in order to demonstrate his possession of her, Janie realizes she now has the marriage with love that she's always wanted; her image of the pear tree blossom is revived.
However, the area is hit by the great Okeechobee hurricane, and in the chaos of surviving, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning, and he contracts the disease. While the disease runs its course, he becomes increasingly jealous and unpredictable despite Janie's best efforts. He ultimately tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, and she is forced to shoot him first with a rifle in self-defense. She is charged with murder.
At the trial, Tea Cake's black male friends show up to oppose her, but a group of local white women arrive to support Janie. The all-white jury acquits Janie, and she gives Tea Cake a lavish funeral. Tea Cake's friends are apologetic and forgive her, and they want her to remain in the Everglades. However, she decides to return to Eatonville.
As she expected, the residents are gossiping about her when she arrives back in town. The story ends where it started, and Janie finishes telling her story to Pheoby

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[Unsigned publisher's foreword, first edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1937):]

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Miss Hurston has fulfilled the early promise of her first books. Her writing is of the essence of poetry, deeply communicative, possessed of a primitive rhythm that speaks truly to the consciousness even before thought can form. This new novel is one of warmth and humor and rich, transcendent beauty. Janie's conscious life had begun at Grandma's gate. When Nanny had spied Janie letting Johnny Taylor kiss her over the gatepost she had called Janie to come inside the house. That had been the end of her childhood. Soon after that Janie and Logan Killicks were married in Nanny's parlor. But love did not come to Janie as Nanny had told her it would. And one day Joe Starks, "from in and through Georgy," came walking down the road. Though he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, Joe spoke for far horizons, for change and chance, and Janie at last agreed to go off with him. But in the years of their marriage Janie was never very happy with him. When Joe died, Janie was not yet forty and still a handsome woman. She had refused more than one offer of marriage before the day that Tea Cake stepped into the store. He was younger than she, so much younger that at first Janie dared not believe in the happiness he brought to her. But their life together told her all that she needed to know. This is the story of Miss Hurston's own people, but it is also a story of all peoples--of man and of woman, and of the mystery that the world holds.

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On the surface, the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée usually identified as Lady Brett Ashley. Barnes is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. Book One is set in the café society of young American expatriates in Paris. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute (Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count Mippipopolous in a nightclub. Later, Brett tells Jake she loves him, but they both know that they have no chance at a stable relationship. In Book Two, Jake is joined by Bill Gorton, recently arrived from New York, and Brett's fiancé Mike Campbell, who arrives from Scotland. Jake and Bill travel south and meet Robert Cohn at Bayonne for a fishing trip in the hills northeast of Pamplona. Instead of fishing, Cohn stays in Pamplona to wait for the overdue Brett and Mike. Cohn had an affair with Brett a few weeks earlier and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. After Jake and Bill enjoy five days of fishing the streams near Burguete, they rejoin the group in Pamplona. All begin to drink heavily. Cohn is resented by the others, who taunt him with anti-semitic remarks. During the fiesta the characters drink, eat, watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake introduces Brett to the 19-year-old matador Romero at the Hotel Montoya; she is smitten with him and seduces him. The jealous tension among the men builds—Jake, Campbell, Cohn, and Romero each want Brett. Cohn, who had been a champion boxer in college, has a fistfight with Jake and Mike, and another with Romero, whom he beats up. Despite his injuries, Romero continues to perform brilliantly in the bullring. Book Three shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona; Bill returns to Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastián on the northern coast of Spain. As Jake is about to return to Paris, he receives a telegram from Brett asking for help; she had gone to Madrid with Romero. He finds her there in a cheap hotel, without money, and without Romero. She announces she has decided to go back to Mike. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi speaking of the things that might have been.

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Ernest Hemingway's first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," treats of certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: "You are all a lost generation." This is the novel for which a keen appetite was stimulated by Mr. Hemingway's exciting volume of short stories. "In Our Time." The clear objectivity and the sustained intensity of the stories , and their concentration upon action in the present moment, seemed to point to a failure to project a novel in terms of the same method, yet a resort to any other method would have let down the reader's expectations. It is a relief to find that "The Sun Also Rises" maintains the same heightened, intimate tangibility as the shorter narratives and does it in the same kind of weighted, quickening prose.

I would like to read this novel because I have always admired Hemingway's other works, including

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The Sun Also Rises