SwissEduc: Plath, Sylvia: 1932-1963

The Bell Jar, 1971 - Information about the Book

Commentary
The Bell Jar is based largely on Plath's own suicide attempt (summer, 1953) and subsequent treatment at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. The novel represents a culmination of Plath's attempts to describe her experience of mental illness and treatment.
In writing the book, mainly in 1961, Plath reused a number of phrases from earlier poems, including the description of electroshock therapy, "darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard" (from "Face Lift"). The Bell Jar launched the final phase of Plath's career; she wrote some of the poems later published in Ariel, the book which secured her place in the canon, on the back of Bell Jar drafts.
Amanda Shaffer
Excerpted, with permission, from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database at New York University School of Medicine, © New York University.

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