Reflecting on The Bell Jar (first published in 1991) acknowledges the repressive post-war regime of social hygiene. Pat Macpherson's reading takes into account

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels “A coming-of-age masterpiece. . . . Sylvia Plath has become one of the influential writers of her time.” —Bo

“An illuminating biography . . . which floods clarifying light on a chapter of the poet’s early life that Plath painted in jaundiced tones in The Bell Jar.�

The Bell Jar has always been troubling reading, because its main character Esther Greenwood is so fully identified with Sylvia Plath herself. Attempts to separa