#4
One of my all time favourites. Plath writes with such quirky artistic beauty, and her only novel is truly powerful, and of course poignant. Lois Ames writes in Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note, ‘On the morning of February 11, 1963, she ended her life. Who can explain why?…that bell jar out of which she had once struggled brilliantly, successfully, apparently completely, but of which she could write with the clarity of the of one who has endured: “to the person in The Bell Jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
Suggested further reading: Sylvia Plath - Ariel, Sylvia Plath - Journals, Diane Middlebrook - Her husband: Hughes and Plath - a Marriage.

