The Bell Jar is often read as a roman-à-clef (novel with a key) in which 20-year-old Esther Greenwood, a straight-A student who undergoes a life-changing mental health crisis, is a stand-in for the writer herself. When first published it ‘became tangled up almost immediately in the drama of her suicide [just weeks later], to the book’s detriment among the critics. However, [when] republished under Plath’s own name… it became a modern classic’ (McCrum 2015).
Plath told her mother that she had ‘throw[n] together events from [her] own life, fictionalising to add colour’; she described the book as ‘an autobiographical apprentice work’ written ‘to free [herself] from the past’ (McCrum 2015). Aurelia Plath, deeply upset to be associated with Esther’s cold and distant mother Mrs Greenwood, denied that the text was autobiographical. ‘Sylvia manipulated it very skilfully,’ she stated. ‘She invented, fused, imagined. She made an artistic whole that read as truth itself’ (Robertson 1979). Linda Wagner-Martin agrees that Plath ‘learned to draw from’ rather than ‘write about’ aspects of her own life, arguing that the links between fact and fiction in The Bell Jar do not form a ‘simple one-to-one equation’ (Wagner-Martin 1999, p. 20).
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