Winner of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, Sylvia Plath is one of the world’s most legendary poets and has been widely hailed as one of the leading proponents of “confessional poetry,” known for such works as Ariel and The Colossus and Other Poems. Her only novel was the semi-autobiographical classic The Bell Jar, which was first published pseudonymously shortly before her own suicide in 1963.
Considered by many to be a roman a clef that retells fictionalized versions of certain events and incidents from Plath’s own life, The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a smart and successful student who nonetheless struggles to fit into the world around her, finding it difficult to take interest or pleasure in any of the avenues available to her in life, describing herself as trapped in a metaphorical bell jar and struggling to breathe.
When it was finally published under Plath’s name in the United States, The Bell Jar became an instant bestseller and has since become a classic of feminism, confessional writing, and ennui.
For those who want some more heavy reading, often dealing with themes of womanhood, angst, and what Plath herself described as “mental health stuff,” these 10 books may just fit the bill.
Pain, Parties, Work
More than any other period in her life, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was informed by her brief stint in Manhattan as a guest editor at the “intellectual fashion magazine” Mademoiselle, and it is this period that author Elizabeth Winder brings to life in this “captivating” book (Slate), which “floods clarifying light on a chapter of the poet’s early life that Plath painted in jaundiced tones in The Bell Jar” (New York Times).
The result is a book that “sparks feelings of impossible nostalgia for someone who didn’t live through the fifties” (Bookslut) while offering a “new perspective on Plath’s life courtesy of Winder’s exhaustive research” (Women Wear Daily).
Wintering
Told with “empathic artistry” (Booklist), this “exceptional first novel” (Publishers Weekly) tells the story of Sylvia Plath’s last months of life. Of her desperate attempts to care for her children, of her fierce love of words, of her despair at the betrayal of her husband and the dissolution of their marriage.
Drawn from Plath’s own letters and journals, Publishers Weekly raves that author Kate Moses’ “habitation of Plath’s body and mind feels complete” in this novel that readers and fans of Sylvia Plath will find “moving almost beyond words.”
Giving Up
During the last days of her life, Sylvia Plath met Jillian Becker and her husband Gerry when she came to stay with them at Mountfort Crescent in London.
Forty years later, Becker finally wrote the story of her brief friendship with the famous poet, and her own memories of Sylvia Plath’s last days in a memoir that “fits in more good sense and compassion on the subject of Sylvia Plath than books ten times as long” (The Independent).
Double Jinx
Selected for the National Poetry Series, Nancy Reddy’s debut collection of poems focuses on the transformations that come with growing up, especially as a woman. Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book, calls it “profound and fierce,” while Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map, hails that “Reddy is the most deft of magicians.”
From Nancy Drew to Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella to the missing link, Double Jinx examines girlhood, womanhood, and the changes that accompany them both in an “exhilarating, beautiful book” (Nicole Cooley, author of Breach) that readers will want to return to again and again.
The Queen of the Tambourine
Winner of the Whitbread Award, this “splendidly engaging, quirky epistolary novel” (Publishers Weekly) is told from the point of view of Eliza Peabody, a woman with a seemingly perfect life in a well-to-do part of South London.
Even as Eliza’s own marriage begins to fray, she becomes obsessed with her neighbor Joan, who has recently abandoned husband, children, and even dog to run off to a variety of very “unvacationy” (Booklist) places such as Bangladesh. She begins a lengthy letter writing campaign to Joan, through which Eliza, an exceptionally unreliable narrator, gradually also tells her own story in this unforgettable book.
Green Girl
Hailed as “ambitious in a way few works of fiction are” (BookForum), Kate Zambreno’s breakout novel is a “searing” (Bookslut) story of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, learning how to both navigate and perform femininity.
Read it to see why Vanity Fair raved that, “I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely” while Kirkus Reviews promises that “it makes you call your girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone.”
An Innocent Fashion
Elian San Jamar has always longed for something more, and a job at the prestigious fashion magazine Regine seems like it will supply it in this “charming and very astute” (Travel + Leisure) coming-of-age novel that led Kirkus Reviews to proclaim R. J. Hernandez a “diamond-sharp satirist and a bracingly fresh chronicler of the heartbreak of trying to grow up.”
The result is an “unapologetic view into the underbelly of fashion media” (People) that is “wry … literary … [and] eminently believable” (Washington Post).
Girl, Interrupted
Adapted into the 1999 film of the same name, Susanna Kaysen’s classic memoir of her stay in the same hospital where Sylvia Plath once spent time is a “poignant, honest … triumphantly funny … and heartbreaking story” (New York Times Book Review) in which “Kaysen’s meditations on young women and madness form a trenchant counterpoint to the copies of her medical records that are woven into the text” (New Yorker). Since its original publication in 1993, Girl, Interrupted has become a touchstone in the world of memoirs about mental health and institutionalization that still feels vivid today.
The Virgin Suicides
A national bestseller from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides was adapted into an acclaimed film of the same name by Sofia Coppola.
Hailed by the New York Times as “lyrical and portentous,” it tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters, whose strict parents prevent them from socializing, making them intoxicatingly unknowable and mysterious to the boys of their quiet suburban neighborhood. As they begin to take their lives one by one, Eugenides demonstrates “the storyteller’s most magical gift, the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary” (New York Times Book Review) in this modern classic.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Named one of the best books of the year by a dizzying array of venues including NPR, The New York Times, The AV Club, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Vice, Bustle, The Washington Post, and more, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “darkly hilarious” story of a woman who is seeking to combat alienation by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of a heady cocktail of drugs reminds readers that the author is “the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood” (Vogue).
