Having re-read The Bell Jar I feel more ‘qualified’ now than ever to say something.

Plath’s mental illness and afflictions permeate through each piece of her writing – seen through the only collection published in her lifetime (‘The Colossus’), which features poems like Night Shift, Frog Autumn & The Stones, all of which are underpinned by her melancholy. The same can be said for her posthumous release ‘Ariel’, a collection, which, largely due to Ted Hughes’s re-arrangement, told the story of a woman in love with a fate of self-annihilation and inevitable suicide.

However, the ‘restored’ version, which is said to more closely resemble Plath’s original arrangement of the text, instead focuses on feminine outrage on infidelity and other issues. This comparison alone demonstrates that Plath did not necessarily seek to write her own demise into the pages, but rather, chronicle the unending maltreatment she faced – from the adulterous Hughes, her father’s ghost, and, most well-known, rampant mental illness.

That said, ‘The Bell Jar’, an understood autobiographical novel of sorts, was published under a pseudonym in 1963, just three weeks before Plath took her own life. This made ‘The Bell Jar’ her only published novel, and the only prosaic work published whilst she was living (though, the posthumous ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ is a well-regarded collection of her short stories). Esther is as much as Plath as Plath is Esther. They are inextricably linked. Their suicide attempts, their summer internships, and their father’s death.

In the novel, our protagonist, Esther Greenwood, creates an alternate personality of Elly Higginbottom, a girl who is dissimilar from herself. While Esther is shy or reserved, Elly is overconfident and audacious. Where Esther is alone and fine with it, Elly has herself engaged to a simultaneous interpreter. Much like Esther utilises Elly as a guise for her own shortcomings and insecurities, perhaps the same can be said for Plath, who wields Esther at a just-far-enough distance to talk of her life as though it is just story – something invented, more penetrable than ‘Finnegans Wake’, but fiction just the same.

In saying all this, Esther is an easy character to like. You root for her because above all else – she is young and she is ailed and it is not her fault. Her own admitted destiny to be electrocuted like the Rosenbergs speaks for itself. Upon reading the novel, we realise that from page one we are told how her story will end, but, happily, there is hope by the turn of the last page.

Esther is (spoiler) likely set to leave the hospital and return to her ‘normal’ life. She exists in a realm of recovery and happiness. A second chance. Or rebirth. But, unfortunately for Plath, this chance never came. As briefly mentioned, on February 11th 1963, just 28 days after the publication of her first and only novel, Plath took her own life.

Though I think many get bogged down in this detail of Plath as Esther / Esther as Plath, and get lost in the mourning of Plath and thriving of Esther, and in doing so, forget to digest the story in full.
In all its witty, dark and self-spoken pages, ‘The Bell Jar’ is a story of illness, of pressure, of failings.

The unfortunate death of Plath does in fact illustrate this best, as her death has come to typify the notion of a ‘tortured artist’, but, perhaps to me, the most impactful element of the novel is the unexpected suicide of Esther’s hometown friend, Joan. Her hanging creates this shock that best encapsulates what mental illness often is – malignant & lurking. The reader does not know why she did what she did, and that is the part that has remained with me through both readings of this book.