The Really Popular Book Club: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Often described as “a Catcher in the Rye for girls” Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar is for some people the depression novel, telling the story of Plath’s own depression, suicide attempt and time in a psychiatric hospital. But this belies the novel's wicked sense of humour, rocketing pace and bold heroine who refuses to be cut down to size by a world in which women can’t want it all.

We will be discussing the novel with Samantha Ellis, British playwright and writer best known for her book How to Be a Heroine and her play How to Date a Feminist.

To aide the conversation, we have prepared three 'thinking points' to consider when reading the book:

The heroine Esther Greenwood has a difficult relationship with her mother. Does the mother-daughter relationship feel groundbreaking, or possibly even feminist, in the way it explores mothers and daughters?

The conversation about mental health is so different now from in 1963; does The Bell Jar still have something to say about mental health now?

How does The Bell Jar interact with Plath’s poetry?

About The Really Popular Book Club

The Really Popular Book Club is Cambridge University Libraries' book group. Everyone is welcome to come and discuss a really popular book with the group, library staff, and an expert on the novel. Hosted on Zoom, the book club is completely free and open to everyone, people attend from all over the world. The Really Popular Book Club celebrates the huge range of books at Cambridge University Library. We have more than 8 million books and as a legal deposit library we keep a copy of every book published in the UK, and have done since 1710.

If you haven't attended one of our book club events before, you can find more information at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/bookclub.

This session of The Really Popular Book Club is being hosted as part of the Cambridge Festival.