The 100 best novels: No 85 – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)

Sylvia Plath’s painfully graphic roman à clef, in which a woman struggles with her identity in the face of social pressure, is a key text of Anglo-American feminism

Sylvia Plath’s only novel was originally published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and became tangled up almost immediately in the drama of her suicide, to the book’s detriment among the critics. However, republished under Plath’s own name in 1966, it became a modern classic.

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” After this brittle, dangerous introduction to the summer of 1953, we meet Esther Greenwood who is, she tells us, “supposed to be having the time of my life”. It’s a theme that, 40 years on, would become commercialised, even satirised, in Sex and the City.

Related: Sylvia Plath: 50 years later and the same bitter arguments rage on | Hadley Freeman

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