On the page, “The Bell Jar” tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a high-achieving college student from Massachusetts who has been selected to spend a summer in New York City working at the prestigious ...

There is a reason it is a modern classic and an enduring rite of passage for generations of women. Emily Van Duyne, Plath expert and author of the upcoming book “Loving Sylvia Plath” explains that the ...

Elisha Wise will receive funding from the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (ARCH) from October 2025. In chapter seven of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), protagonist Esther Greenwood ...

Sylvia Plath may have Hollywood staying power, but her influence on young women often fades as they age. Here, Janet Rafferty and her daughter Mary consider how adulthood altered their perceptions of ...

Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar inspired existential crisis in women everywhere with the author’s exclamation “Fig Tree” analogy, which examines the destabilizing feeling associated with having too ...

The events described in Sylvia Plath’s literary masterpiece “The Bell Jar” take place in the early 1950s, a period contemporary Americans often refer to as “The Good Ol’ Days.” This era is undoubtedly ...

Now through June 2024: The Smith College Botanic Garden presents "The Bell Jars: Lyman Conservatory and Sylvia Plath’s Botanical Imagination." This collaborative exhibit sheds new light on Plath’s ...

In chapter seven of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), protagonist Esther Greenwood imagines her life branching out before her like a green fig-tree. Each individual fig on the branches represents a ...