"From the time she was a young child, Sylvia Plath wanted to write. Her first poem was published when she was just eight years old in a Boston newspaper, and she began writing an early novel, titled Stardust, when she was nine. She published regularly in her school magazines; by the time she was eighteen, her poetry and fiction had appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and Seventeen after more than fifty rejections. Plath became the star of the English department at her undergraduate alma mater, Smith College, where she won top prizes and graduated summa cum laude in 1955. A Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University followed, and, after graduating in 1957, she began publishing poems in the New Yorker and other prestigious literary journals. Her first book of poetry, The Colossus, received excellent reviews when it came out in 1960. Throughout this time Plath aspired to write a novel, but the form eluded her until she was nearly thirty. Plath wrote The Bell Jar in the spring and summer of 1961 when she was living in London with her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes, and their one-year-old daughter. She had been working in fits and starts on a novel about her early years at Cambridge, titled Falcon Yard, but it never caught fire. Then, after a brief hospitalization for an appendectomy in February 1961, The Bell Jar came to Plath in a rush. The routine hospital stay unlocked other, more traumatic memories of her experience as a psychiatric patient at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, in 1953. Each morning, Plath wrote fluently and without shame about this painful period of her life. In 1953, Plath had won a coveted spot as a summer guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in Manhattan. She spent the month of June contributing to features, attending fashion events, and helping to manage the magazine's day-to-day production. The pressures were intense, and the experience left her exhausted and disillusioned. Was this all Plath could hope for as an aspiring woman writer? Would her work be limited to penning fashion captions, like the one she had written for the August Mademoiselle about the 'astronomic versatility of sweaters?' Heatwaves, food poisoning, and the attentions of predatory men also left their mark on Plath's psyche that summer. When Plath returned home to Wellesley, Massachusetts, at the end of her internship, she learned that she had been rejected from Frank O'Connor's writing class at Harvard Summer School. ..."
LitHub
NY Times - Review: 'The Bell Jar,' by Sylvia Plath (1971)
Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" still resonates almost 60 years later
1960s: Days of Rage - The Bell Jar (1963)
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