36. The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath’s Tragedy

How did the paranoia of 1950s McCarthyist America shape Sylvia Plath? Why was The Bell Jar the poet's only novel? And, what was the truth of her relationship with fellow poet Ted Hughes? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Bell Jar, and the world it was born of. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:10Speaker 00

  I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat, purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children. And another fig was a famous poet. And another fig was a brilliant professor. And another fig was E.G., the amazing editor. And another fig was Europe and Africa and South America. And another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions. And another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion. And beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I

• 0:55Speaker 00

  couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest. And as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black. And one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Hello, everybody. So that is a very celebrated passage from The Bell Jar by the poet Sylvia Plath. And Plath published it in Britain in January 1963. She published it initially under a pen name, Victoria Lucas. And it was published just weeks before she took her own life. And we will be talking about that, obviously. It's quite a tragic story. And if you have small children in the car or something, be warned that it's...

• 1:40Speaker 00

  It's quite disturbing content, I think.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  When I finish the final chapter, I often find that I have more questions at the end than I started with.

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  What happens next? Why did the story end there? But you know, Tabby, it's hard to make time to ponder big questions like that because I'm always getting bogged down in kind of boring day to day admin.

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• 4:10Speaker 01

  So the book wasn't published in the United States till 1971, but it became a sensation in the 1970s and 80s. It became a kind of great feminist classic. And to some extent, the book is a romance. So it's a disguised autobiography by Sylvia Plath, talking about a lot of her own experiences growing up. And as you get a sense of it from that opening reading, it's about a young woman, very bright young woman, who is suffocating under the weight of her anxiety and her depression. She wants to fulfill her ambitions. She has all kinds of ideas about what she might become, as we can tell in that reading, the kind of branching fig tree.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, the figs.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  But she's in 1950s America and she feels stifled by the expectations of her society. And this sort of internal battle, this uncertainty, this search for a sort of a role and for meaning takes her to some very dark places indeed, doesn't it, Tabby?

• 5:12Speaker 00

  It does. And the book is famous for, in fact, it's sort of been mythologized for this very raw, unflinching take on mental illness, on depression. And also simultaneously, this idea of female rage against societal convention, against patriarchy. And it's become, in the years since its publication, I think probably still is, wouldn't you say? A subversive cult classic. And Sylvia Plath herself, I mean, she's a literary icon. She's almost become a posthumous cultural luminary. She's so famous, more famous than her work almost, I think. You know, she's sort of been deified.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Well, Virginia Woolf, actually, is a good comparison to a writer who you might see on a T-shirt.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. That's very, very true. But it's a mystique born not only of her book, of her poetry, but also, I think, probably

• 6:07Speaker 00

  the romanticization of her very tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes, another famous British poet. Her tortured inner life, you know, her depression. And then also her tragic early death at only 30. I think it's sort of being sensationalized, maybe arguably slightly overshadowing her work and who she actually was, but we'll discuss that a bit more later. Before we do so, what did you make of it, Dominic? Because I often try to make a prediction for what you will think of a book that we do.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Really?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I actually didn't really know what to think this time.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Please tell me, Tabby, that I sometimes surprise you, that I'm not utterly predictable.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  You actually often surprise me, I have to say. It pains me to say it.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good to know. Well, the point of reading is to be open minded, isn't it? And to surprise yourself.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  That's definitely not something anyone could accuse you of, is kind of being closed minded, I think, or predictable.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. Wow. We should end the podcast here.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  I know.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  This is great. I think sort of leaning into my stereotype or my caricature a bit, if I'm allowed to do that. To be clear, Tabby, it's unbelievable that you started branding me as Toad to Toad Hall and actually in the episode, you said I was rat.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  I know, you are rat in fairness.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  And you made me very happy with that.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  No, but to be honest, I hadn't read it because, for the reason that so many men don't read these kinds of books, because basically a lot of men think it's not really for me, it's a feminist classic. And the branding of the book positions it very much as a book for sort of anxious women. I mean, that sounds like a mad thing to say and...

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think you're wrong, though.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  But anyway, I read it and I really enjoyed it. I read it on holiday. It's an odd holiday read, but I loved it actually. I loved the portrait of 50s America. I thought, as you say, raw is the word.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  That also plays into the stereotypes slightly, doesn't it?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Of course. It underplays the artistry of the book, I think, and the skill with which it is written. But I found it, I thought it was moving. I thought it was very evocative. You know, it's an odd thing to say for a book about depression and a book about some very dark things. But I really enjoyed it and I thought she wrote, I thought Sylvia Plath wrote about depression, the narrative voice, the way she conveyed it, I thought was extremely skillful and very well handled.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I actually agree. And I don't think that you're sort of totally off base when you say you thought it would be a book about kind of female anxiety, whatever. I had actually subtly avoided the bell jar because I thought it would make me feel a bit depressed. I thought it would like, it was all about teen angst and I just didn't know if I kind of, you know, sometimes things leave their imprint and I was like, oh God, I don't fucking bear it. I think I was so wrong. I think to read it as just that is to flatten the bell jar and also Sylvia Plath as just anxiety and depression and psychological torment. Because, yeah, the subject matter of the book is bleak, but actually the book is not. It's quite bright, like the colors of the book are quite bright.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  I love the voice of the narrator, Esther Greenwood, because she's cynical and wry and self-knowing. I actually found so many parts of the book really funny, unexpectedly. I think Plath is a great, sharp writer. She always cuts off the fat.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  The characterization of the different people, very skillfully done. I also think, you know, I love, lots of people love books about kind of 50s America and we'll talk about this, and I think she evokes that. That world really well.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, but also I do think I can see why it means so much to so many people because certainly the first half of the book, I think is surely relatable to most young people who are trying to, you know, work out what they want to do. Maybe they've been in institutions, realising that actually the world doesn't just kind of play ball with dreams or whatever.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Um. But particularly, I think, for the female adolescent adolescence of 50s America.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Just to give people a sense of the context, it's set in the summer of 1953, this incredibly well-known opening line, a brilliant line, by the way.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  So good.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. And we'll just talk about that line a little bit in a second. So we are in Eisenhower's America, Cold War America, less than a decade after the end of the Second World War. This is the era of the affluent society, you know, America is booming, massive cars, big fridges, all of that sort of thing. But it's also the world of McCarthyism. So McCarthy, the red scares, reds under the beds, search for communist enemies within. And I think the tendency among a lot of writers now is to slightly overdo the, the discussion of this as a,

• 10:41Speaker 01

  as a world that is so repressive and terrible and suffocating, all this kind of thing. I mean, it's a world in which most people are better off than anybody else on the planet and are better off than anybody in history has ever been. So there's definitely a lot of good things about 1950s America as well as the bad things.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it's also the post-war boom, isn't it?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  It is the post-war boom. And people who tend to write about this in the context of Sylvia Plath, so for example, one of her biographers, Heather Clark, says, this is a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the best minds of a generation crazy. I mean, how true is that? You know, it's obviously a world in which a lot of people are going to university in greater numbers than ever before. They have opportunities that nobody's ever had. However, you know, there is perhaps a sort of conformity to it. It's quite a conservative society and one in which, in particular, women, young women, sort of can be stifling expectations of them and the roles that they are going to play. You know, this is the absolute peak of the post-war nuclear family. You know, people are getting married extremely young. There is an expectation that, oh, you know, the woman will be the,

• 11:42Speaker 01

  the perfect kind of housewife and mother, the kind of kitchen goddess and all of this kind of thing. So there's a tension, I suppose, in this book, as in so many fictional portraits of 50s America, between on the one hand, the bright, breezy, you know, the world of the prom and of the diner and of the white picket fence and everybody in these lovely massive dresses.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  It's like suburban prosperity, isn't it? You know, you get that image of the, the see you later, honey. And the guy leaves with the briefcase, the wife looking with pearls, coiffed hair, waving him off.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Exactly that. And I know this is a, it's from a few years later, but the world of Mad Men, the opening series of Mad Men.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Sort of Don and Betty Draper, that sort of world. But obviously Sylvia Plath in this book is slightly pushing against that. So you described it as subversive. I mean, what she's obviously, this is a book written by somebody who feels like an outsider, who finds a lot of this stuff, who does find it repressive.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Does find it.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Stifling.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And actually, that takes us back to the opening line. The opening line, it was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of betraying the US, giving secrets to the Soviet Union and stuff. So there you have the dark side, I guess. Right there in the opening line, you have the, the thing that she reaches for is something that tells you about her view of that society and of the sort of ugliness of it, I guess, the suspicion or the paranoia or the violence. Throughout the book, I think that there's a tension between that. And then there's the, the massive meals and the cars and the sort of consumerist sort of world.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  That's queaky, clean aesthetic, isn't it? Bright colours.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  So it's one of a number of books sort of set in the 50s. There's like the stories of John Cheever or something. Or have you read Revolutionary Road, Tabby?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  I, I've never read it, but I know of it, because that's also doing the same thing, isn't it? It's showing the dark side to the domestic, I don't know, prosperity or pleasantness of, of that time.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And the same thing with a, a woman, a young woman who is chafing.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And motherhood and, and stuff like that. But as Sylvia Plath's protagonist in this is chafing as she did in real life. But we will get on to Plath in a second. First of all, just a very quick plot rundown for people that aren't familiar with the book. And actually, it's no coincidence that the plot is strikingly similar to Plath's own life. So the protagonist is Esther Greenwood. She is clever, high achieving. She's 19 years old. She's a 19-year-old undergraduate student. And for the first quarter of the book, she's in New York because she's won this prestigious summer internship at a ladies magazine, thanks to her wealthy benefactor. I love this name, Philomena Guinea. He's the writer of crap women's fiction, but.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  It's that technical.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  That's crap. That's technical literary term. But rather than feel excited and happy, like she says in the very earliest pages, I was supposed to be having the time of my life. She feels wicked dull and empty and anxious. And she is overwhelmed by the work, which her peers seem to love. She finds the fashion world repellently artificial and materialistic. She feels that herself and the, and the girls that she's with are sort of objectified wherever they go. She makes friends with this sardonic, quite fun girl called Doreen, who she goes to loads of parties and stuff with, but it all ends up quite badly. Another thing is though to say, Esther is, while she's chafing against this society and its constrictions and its traditions,

• 15:15Speaker 00

  she is also still an American teen. So she's thinking about, you know, conventional things like losing her virginity. She's thinking about the Yale prom. All the while, though, she's disintegrating. And she starts to reject all of these sort of stepping stones or, or kind of the furniture of, of American adolescence. For instance, signified by the fact that at one point she throws all of the gorgeous clothes that she's got from this internship off a roof in New York. I would never do that. But you can see that she's like, right, that's it. I'm rejecting this artificial materialism.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  But I think that's very nicely done. The fact that she's torn between the two things, because that's how people, you know, normal people think. You, you never like just one thing or the other. You might be tempted by this particular world and at the same time repulsed by it.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. And, and, and deep down, we all want to fit in, no matter how unhappy or anything we are.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed completely. So then she goes back, doesn't she, to New England, to her small town. Her father is dead. She lives with her mum. And it's there that actually she really starts to become undone. And there's this moment that I think is in many ways the turning point of the book. We might talk about this passage later because I think it's actually brilliantly written. When she finds out that she hasn't made it onto a writing course. And this is just like, I mean, she says it's like being punched in the stomach.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  She feels that basically she has been a bright girl, a massive achiever, and she's done really well in school.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And then she feels, oh my God, you know, that's led to nothing. That's basically what that's going to lead to is a boring suburban marriage to this boring suburban boyfriend who has the unimprovable name of Buddy Willard.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  He's such a snore, honestly. I have no time for Buddy.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  He's a medical student, isn't he?

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Which means that he's very eligible. You know, her mum, her mum is very keen that they keep together. Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  He's absolutely going to be the man who leaves with the briefcase, you know, first thing in the morning and then comes home and says, honey, I'm home and whatever.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  What's for dinner? Meatloaf, honey?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  I was just about to say, it will be meatloaf. You just know it's meatloaf. It's at this point that I think we first get the metaphor of the bell jar.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  The idea of the sort of suffocating, the kind of cloche or whatever descending over you. And this is a sort of, this is the, the, obviously the metaphor that really defines the book, the idea of suffocating and being trapped. And she sinks into depression. The depression gets worse. She thinks about suicide. She goes through this extremely traumatic course of electroshock therapy. Again, I have to say, a brilliant passage. Not overdone, almost quite understated, and yet still, again, I think we'll talk about that passage later.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And yet so visceral, you know, so shocking. Listeners be warned because some people may find this very distressing.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  She tries to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. She wakes up in hospital. And then the last part of the book is about her time in a, in a mental institution. And this obviously sticks in a lot of readers' minds. It's based on the McLean Hospital where Sylvia Plath herself was hospitalized. And actually, all the stuff we've talked about pretty much happened to Sylvia Plath. So it's a novel and it's written with a novelist's craft. And yet, obviously, in some ways, this is book as an work of autobiography, isn't it, Tabby?

• 18:32Speaker 00

  It's a thinly veiled autobiography of a very particular period in Sylvia Plath's life. But beyond the bell jar, we can get such a strong sense of her, stronger than so many of the writers that we've done on the show, because she. Was a prolific writer. She wrote letters, so many of which we have, we still have, and journals, many of which we also still have. She wrote, she started writing her journals when she was 11.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  And kept it up pretty much constantly, didn't she?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  And kept it up pretty much until her death, yeah. The thing that really came across to me, and which I was delighted by, was she was a woman of really powerful appetite. It was as though she wanted to experience all of life. You know, she loved literature, she loved romance, she loved colours, she, she loved nature, actually. I think that's been slightly underplayed, element of Sylvia Plath, and she loved food. So her friends, I know, her friends always used to moan that she would eat and eat and eat and eat. She was always hungry, but she never gained weight. And one of her absolute favourites was a deluxe peanut butter sandwich spiced with onion, mayonnaise and bacon, which I think sounds abhorrent.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  So American. I think that's so American. It's like that mad thing that Americans do where they will mix sweet and savory. And it's just worthy of Patrick Bateman, this dish.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  What is it? Mayonnaise, peanut butter. Mayonnaise and peanut butter together is insane.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Mayonnaise, peanut butter.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Spiced with onion, mayonnaise, oh yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Bacon. What's a bacon doing in there?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Deranged. It's so, this is the kind of stuff that, do you remember when we went to that diner when we were on tour in America?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  I remember.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  And I asked for biscuits and gravy because I was curious.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  This was an extraordinary moment.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Well, it was a vast trough full of this white sludge. Anyway, it's best not to recall. Food aside, the other thing that really comes across about Plath is that she could be very catty. She could be quite bitchy, particularly about women, actually, women that she felt sort of threatened by.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  That comes through in the first part of the book.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Comes through in the belga. But she was, she was extraordinarily witty. You get the sense that she's sort of always willing to be more emotionally exposed than I think most people probably are. And physically, she was tall, very tall, slender. She was quite elegant. And she was ambitious from a young age and extremely industrious. So she's doggerly determined to be a successful writer. She published her first poem when she was eight. And in fact, she was something of a literary prodigy. And when they tested her IQ, they found that she was actually a genius.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  She had an amazing capacity to kind of overcome rejection. She, she had so many rejections. One journal rejected her one of her poems 45 times or something.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Forty-five?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  That's a lot of times.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  A lot of times. And she was very careful with money. She was very sort of organised. But you do get the sense, a bit like Esther in the novel. She struggles to square this sense of herself as an ambitious writer, an ambitious young woman, with the other things that she seems to want, which is kind of love and romance. The desire to fit in and kind of be glamorous. And because that's another thing that comes out again and again in her journals, is the search for romantic love, an equal who won't undermine her, who won't kind of steal her thunder, and will kind of allow her her hopes and dreams. And she often felt incomplete and off balance and insecure without a man. She was a prolific data. So she wrote, which I think is so witty, wittily written,

• 21:52Speaker 00

  "Oh, how agreeable I am that I need 50 blazing brutes to tell me so." You know how wonderfully self-knowing. She kind of needed romantic validation despite, you know, her search for independence. It's likely why she ended up choosing Ted Hughes, a man who she probably thought would share her ambitions. And we'll talk about that in a sec because that's surely one of the most famous or iconic literary marriages of all time, wouldn't you say?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Of course, I would indeed. But just to sketch her background a second, she's born in Boston, Massachusetts. She's a New Englander. Her mother was the daughter of an Austrian immigrant. Her father Otto Plath was a German-American academic, wasn't he?

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  He was an expert. He taught German, I think at Boston University, but also biology.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  And he's massive on entomology, so insects, but also bumblebees are the big thing.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Loved bumblebees, as I do, and as Sylvia Plath did. She loved bees.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Do you love bumblebees?

• 22:42Speaker 00

  I do. They make me feel warm and sort of not cynical.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, what if they sting you?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  It's true, yeah. Well, then the cynicism comes back and forth.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. So it's quite a traditional family upbringing. So, I mean, because obviously so much of this book and her her sort of mystique is about women trapped by patriarchal society. And Otto is a bit of a patriarch, isn't he?

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And actually, she has a very conflicted and interesting attitude to him. So you put me on to this, actually, Tabby, the poem Daddy?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  It's one of my favourite poems.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  But it's quite a dark, it's a very dark poem, actually, about her attitude to her father.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  She's been a bit criticised for it because she makes a connection between basically totalitarian dictatorship.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Second World War sort of totalitarian dictatorship and patriarchy and fatherhood.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  But I love it. I love the meter of it. I like the clean prose of it.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  And you can find online on YouTube a recording of her reading it, and it's fabulous.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Oh, no way. So anyway, he died, I mean, part of the reason she has a conflicted attitude towards him, I think, is that he died when she was, what, eight?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Uh, he had a foot amputated for diabetes and the operation went wrong.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  He had thought for years he had cancer.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  And he was just too scared to go and check it out. Turns out it was diabetes. And so Sylvia Plath, for the rest of her life, had this kind of weird feeling that he'd almost he'd subliminally taken his own life.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Really?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Because he never checked it out. He could have, you know, he could have survived.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So in a sense, she, does she almost blame him?

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  For, you know, for not having had it checked out or whatever? And she's definitely haunted by it, isn't she? So at one point in the book, in the belga, Esther, as Sylvia Plath's avatar, says, "I was only happy for the first nine years of my life before my father died." And actually, Plath wrote about this herself. She said that there was a division between before Daddy's death and afterwards. And the years before were shut off like a ship in a bottle, beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine white flying myth. Lovely writing.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Lovely writing.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Anyway, she, I suppose to some extent, she feels the loss of her father, but also she feels the pressure of having to live up to her mother's expectations, really.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Because they were very poor after he Otto died. So money was always an issue and her mother had to go back to work.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she feels almost that her mother's love is itself a burden for her. So

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  You found this letter, didn't you, that she wrote to her? Or I say you found it, I mean, you read, you read about it.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's original, actually. It's an original discovery. Plath academics all over the, all over the country are pulling their hair out.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  To be clear, Tabby read this in a book.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  I didn't read this in a book.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Uh, she wrote a letter to her brother Warren in 1953. "It's a frightening thing that mother would actually kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all that she wanted to do for us. She's an abnormally altruistic person, and I've realised lately," and this is such an interesting line, "that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would against deadly disease." And you can sort of see what that means, I think, especially for a child, a parent who is almost too loving, who projects so much onto you, that can be a very, very heavy burden to carry.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  I think she felt a bit sort of strangulated, A by the love, but also the fact, I mean, she shared a bedroom with her mother until she was in her late teens, as Esther does in the book. And so that constant presence must have

• 26:11Speaker 00

  just come to suffocate her, I suppose. Anyway.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  She went to high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1950. She then got a scholarship to a private women's liberal arts college, Smith, also Massachusetts. And like Esther in the novel, she's an academic star. She's brilliant. She's actually unusually intelligent. The thing that's interesting, though, is if you read her letters from this time, and then you read her journals at this time, there's always just a discrepancy in terms of how she's feeling during this period. Because she often writes to her mother things like, "Oh, Mumsy, I'm so happy here, I could cry." But in her journals, she's often feeling quite low. Maybe that's that thing again about trying to please her mother. I don't know.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Trying to please her mother or?

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Different states of mind.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it sounds like a mad comparison. I'm appalled at myself, but different platforms, you know, you, you use for different, for different feelings, almost.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  God, you're so like hip. Love that for you.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Different platforms.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Suffocating, I, I, I'm struggling with the suffocating expectations of you mocking everything I say.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Of your co-presenter.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Anyway, she then, like Esther in the novel, she wins this Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest in 1952, which earns her a very coveted internship in New York. And she's working as a guest editor for a month in June 1953, living at this fancy hotel, but she did not enjoy it as she had expected. She found the pressure exhausting, the environment very intense. She thought that she was going there to meet like Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  And it was far from that. It was, she found it boring, didn't like the materialism. And she actually wrote that she felt that all these young girls were kind of trotted out and sort of objectified wherever they went, sort of how they looked or whatever. And that experience, that summer experience is exactly what inspired the belga. And actually, so true to life is her portrait of, of that time in the book, that some of the women that she was on the course with in New York later said that her account of their lives in New York was so accurate that they could never look at each other again. And some even blamed her and the belga for breaking up their marriages. I'm looking at you, Doreen.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  I think that's really harsh. I will say.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  I think that's harsh.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  I think the first quarter of the book or so, the stuff in New York, I absolutely loved that.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I thought it was so well-written. And as you say, very, very funny when they have food poisoning.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  No, or when, when they go to a fancy dinner and she, she has a finger bowl to clean her hands in and she ends up drinking it because she thinks it's a soup.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Anyway, or this time is, it's the real catalyst for, for a shocking downturn, a dangerous downturn in Sylvia Plath's mental health. Because she returns home after this month in New York to the news that she too, well, like her hero, has been rejected from a Harvard writing course, brought on terrible anxiety, insomnia, depression. So that's when she underwent her first.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Extraordinarily traumatic course of electroshock therapy. And it it was traumatic because it was badly administered. She wasn't given given anesthetic, which means that she was essentially being electrocuted.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  And she was so frightened of this experience that she might have to relive it. That part of the reason, I think, that maybe she was driven to take her own life, but also because she wrote to a letter to a friend just before um the real, the worst phase of her depression, that she would rather uh die than lose her independence and her free will. And she didn't want her her family to remember her as just a mental patient. Someone kind of turned into a mummy by this electroshock therapy. She wanted them to remember her as she was.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  So the electroshock therapy um is, as you say, the catalyst for her first uh suicide attempt, which was in August nineteen fifty three. Plath crawled into this little space underneath the family home and she took sleeping pills. And three days passed before she was found and it actually was reported in the local newspapers. Brilliant college girl disappears.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  And like her heroine, like Esther, she um is hospitalized. She gets psychiatric treatment at McLean Hospital. And this is funded by her patron, you know, just as Esther has a patron, so Sylvia Plath had a patron who was called Olive Higgins Prouty. But, you know, the book ends not long after, the book cuts off, so we don't find out what happens to Esther. But what happened to Sylvia Plath? She recovered, she graduated from Smith, did really well. She got a scholarship to Cambridge University, to Newham College, a women's college at Cambridge. She went there. Um at first, she's very excited about going to England. She thinks it'll be a liberation, you know, um America is stuffy, England is exciting. But actually, it's a very common experience among Americans who actually come to Oxford and Cambridge.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  They arrive and they find it very disappointing. They struggle with the weather, they struggle with the sort of unfriendliness of the locals.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Snobby English people.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she found it bleak and all of this. She didn't have any heating, of course, it's fifty's Britain, so, you know, it's some way behind America economically.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  She felt like a an impostor, like an intellectual interloper. I mean, obviously a very common experience for people at university. She's felt that people found her too American, too enthusiastic. And I have to say, very disappointingly, Tabby has points. Tabby made the point to me that she believes I would be one of the people who would be horrible to Sylvia Plath.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  I could so see you turning your nose up at some, you know, enthusiastic American in a tutorial. To be fair, having said that, having said that, you you're very fond of um America and Americans. And you actually once told me that you like their jollity, their positivity, so I misspoke.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  I do like their positivity. I do like their positivity, exactly. Thank you, Tabby. Uh you've been very, Tabby's been very cruel sometimes.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  God, maybe I need to take a look in the mirror.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  You took, it's my enthusiasm and idealism that you poke fun at in your cynical way, no?

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Oh, my god. This is a harrowing come to God moment for me.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It is, it is, all right. So anyway, she um she went through a dark night of the soul a little bit. That first winter, you know, God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead. There's my date this weekend, someone who believes I'm a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I'm the whole person, not merely a knot of nerves without identity. I am lost.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Horrible.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Again, though, not perhaps immensely unfamiliar among young people.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  No, well, that's the thing, I think relatable.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Far from home, you know, it it is, yeah, I think a lot of people reading that would say, yes, I felt like that.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  It's a period in your life where you're desperately trying to search out your identity and kind of think you have to have one rather than being able to kind of have lots, sort of thing.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so true. When people say, who am I? They think there's a sentence that actually sums it up or a a defined role. I couldn't agree with more. Anyway, she, you, I mean, you've described her earlier on and her appetites and stuff. She has a real zest for life, I think.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  She really does.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  She throws herself into it. There's a sort of optimism when she travels around Europe, you know, that she's sort of soaking up all the experiences. She says, writes at one point that she is solidly, realistically joyous. So it's not all doom and gloom and introspection and misery. You picked out a line here, didn't you, from nineteen fifty five about writing to her mother? It's cold, biting with blizzard flurries. I bite home from classes and market laden with apples, oranges, nuts and daffodils.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  You might almost say it's carefree, but do you think she's manicuring it? She's sort of curating it for her mother, do you think?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  She absolutely is. She's painting a perfect portrait of life, even as she's struggling. She's a very brave thing to do, I think.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  But then it's two weeks after that, writing those words about cycling home with all the stuff, that she has the meeting that basically changes her life. At a literary party, she meets a young poet called Ted Hughes.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they meet at this Cambridge party. Sylvia Plath had met, had read some of his poems and liked them, so she was kind of curious about him. They're both young, unpublished poets, serious about writing, very ambitious. And when Sylvia Plath described um this meeting in her journal, she wrote it was immediate and intense. And there's a story that at that party, he tried to kiss her and she bit him on the cheek uh in retaliation, long and hard.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  In a flirty way or in a?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  I think in a kind of flirty, but, you know, you have day, but flirty, yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Um and he was a famous Lothario. Um he was very arrogant, he had a deep voice. And she wrote to her mother that he was used to walking over women like a blast of Jove's lightning and described him as a singer, storyteller, lion and world wanderer with a voice like the thunder of God. Isn't that great?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's lovely. What have you written in your notes at this point?

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Uh I've written, I suspect that at this point DS will make the inevitable, inevitable comparison. He is very proud of his own voice.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I am proud of him. Well, I'm also proud of, I don't think about my voice, but I never thought.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  You are, I've heard you say before that one of the best, you're one of your best features is your voice.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Literally, when we're not recording, what normally happens is I'm lecturing Tabby about my best features.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Have you noticed that today it's slightly deeper, slightly different tone? Nicole, Nicole, how do I sound? Anyway.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Um I have never, I mean, that Ted Hughes comparison is not one I'd ever anticipated, but I'll take it, actually.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  But I, you know, I suspect that Sylvia Plath really liked the challenge that Ted Hughes posed. You know, a Lothario, untouchable. In the belter, Esther kind of talks about always wanting what she can't have and her fear that the minute that she commits to a romantic relationship or something, she'll go off them, she'll start seeing the cracks. And you can see how sultry and confident Plath is about winning him. She wrote after this as well in her journal, kiss me and you'll see how important I am.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Um right.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  And I think maybe also, not to be too pop psychology, but maybe she's drawn to his masculinity, his height, his intelligence, you know, possibly the fulfillment of a lifetime miss looking for her father, something like that. This is this great big man. I mean, in Daddy, for instance.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  That poem, which I love, and it's actually slightly tragic insight into the future of their relationship. She wrote, I was ten when they buried you, at twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. I made a model of you, a man in black with a mine camp look and a love of the rack and the screw. And I said, I do, I do.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  So in a weird way, even even though she's always trying to be free.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Trying to be free from the expectations of others and to find her own independent voice and stuff.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  There's a bit of her that, do you think, I mean, this is massively pop psychology.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Is there a bit of her that perhaps likes the dominant alpha male side of Ted Hughes, do you think?

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and she allowed herself to be extremely codependent with him very quickly. So she wrote, away from you, my own judgments are out of kilter. And and also, I think he liked about her, the fact that she was simultaneously quite dark and quite kind of anxious, but also fiercely determined, very intelligent, quite catty, quite witty. So you can see it's two forces of nature coming together. Um and then they're married four months later in June nineteen fifty six. They moved um back to the US for a time in nineteen fifty seven. She resumed therapy, working with this woman called Ruth Boucher, who was the doctor who had helped her recover from her first, um after her first suicide attempt. Then they settle back in England.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  And also during this period, just you can see how hard she's working. She's got a job in the day and she's feverishly writing poetry at night.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Then they settle back in England in December nineteen fifty nine. They're living near Primrose Hill and then between October nineteen sixty and January nineteen sixty two, they have two children, a son and a daughter. And Sylvia Plath's first collection of poetry, Colossus, is published in nineteen sixty. So it's initially a very literary marriage.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's one of those, I mean, there are some marriages in literary history, cultural history, that people have pored over, and this is absolutely one of them. Of course, I I'm always a little bit wary of this because I think you can never truly know what goes on in somebody else's marriage. I mean, people in a marriage themselves, you know, they only know fifty percent of it, of course, because they don't ever, they can never access the other person's mind. Anyway, at first, I mean, this is proper pop psychology now and sort of gossip to an extent, which is why I'm sometimes a bit wary about it. But anyway, at first, it seems like they were, they were genuine partners. Do you not think that they were? They read each other's drafts, they both submitted work to journals together, they helped each other, advised each other. They're slightly different in temperament. Ted Hughes is more impulsive.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  He's, he writes in these sort of manic bursts almost. Sylvia Plath is more disciplined, she's more methodical, she has a schedule and stuff. I mean, she, you know, lots of people listening might say, of course, she has to, because as the, as the mother, you know, her time is more limited and she can't be self indulgent.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  And not only that, but she's also the secretary to both of them. She's submitting all his poems as well as hers. She's typing both of them up. I mean, there's an argument to be made, if someone did make it that I read, that without that administrative role that she took on, he would never have got himself together enough to submit, type up and submit all of his poems.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Tabby, so, so often that is the case, isn't it? I mean, so often, I mean, I don't want to sound like I've become, I mean, I am, I am super woke on this issue.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I know.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  So often you read the biographies of, of inverted commas, great male figures, and there's a woman behind them who's actually doing all the cooking and cleaning, all the washing up, all the secretarial work, basically.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Or cheerleading.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Anyway, at first, it's, it's sort of mutually inspiring and energizing. She wrote in her journal, Ted is the only one who understands my poems, you know, that they're really both getting something from this. But basically, what happens at the end of the nineteen fifty's is he, his style rockets and hers doesn't. So she's getting lots of rejections, he's becoming, you know, the great meteor of kind of English poetry. Also, of course, at this point, she has two very small children. Anybody listening to this show who has ever had even one small child will know,

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  particularly for the mother, this absolutely takes over your life and it's very, very difficult to carve out any time away from it.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  And she said that, you know, when she had just her daughter, Ted would look after her in the mornings and as long as she had her mornings to write, everything else was fine. And then when she had Nicholas, her son, she lost her mornings, so no time.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. And she wrote in her journal, I am a secretary, cook, maid and a poet. So the poet has turned into almost like an afterword. And of course, the other thing that lots of listeners will probably know, there's subsequently been a lot of talk about whether there was domestic abuse in the relationship or whether Hughes was controlling or whether he was violent, whatever. Worth saying, his family have very, very vigorously denied. And it's really hard to know the truth of these things because it's become obscured with so much kind of cultural and gender politics that sometimes the only honest answer is to say, we just don't know and we never will. Anyway, she had a miscarriage in nineteen sixty one. That's obviously incredibly traumatic for her.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  In her journals, you get the sense of anger and despair and abandonment. And it's in nineteen sixty one, in August, that she actually, she's been writing The Bell Jar. And she, to sort of work through, I suppose, a lot of what she went through in the nineteen fifty's. And she finishes it in August nineteen sixty one.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and we'll tie up Plath's story at the end of this episode after the second half. But before then, so how did she come to write The Bell Jar? How was it received? So she'd always intended to write a novel, kept stalling, she wins this fellowship grant to write the book in nineteen sixty. And then she doesn't really do much with it. And then in February nineteen sixty one, she goes to hospital for a brief time and it reminds her of her initial breakdown and hospitalisation in nineteen fifty three. So she thinks, well, you know what I'll do? I'll write a thinly veiled biography of everything that I've gone through. But it's not, her own life is actually far from the only inspiration. So the second half of The Bell Jar, where Esther is in and out of medical institutions after a suicide attempt,

• 42:34Speaker 00

  that bears a striking resemblance to The Snake Pit by the American author Mary Jane Ward, which is an autobiographical account of her own recovery from mental illness. And it shows harrowingly the terrible conditions inside psychiatric hospitals at that time. And Sylvia Plath had read a review of this. It had gone down in absolute storm and she's realised, oh, actually, people do want to hear about the truth of mental illness and what goes on and what goes on inside these hospitals. So that was one of many things that spurred her on.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  And then there were literary inspirations too. So I think sometimes what's lost with The Bell Jar, because people reduce it to a book about mental health and anxiety and expression of sort of a scream of pain, is what is lost is the literateness of it. So Dostoevsky is a big influence. We're going to be doing White Nights, aren't we, on the show? Dostoevsky's short story. She wrote her undergraduate thesis, I think, on, on doubling in Dostoevsky's books. And there's a bit of that in the, in, in The Bell Jar, sort of Esther looking in mirrors and things like that. Virginia Woolf, of course, so Mrs. Dalloway, which we talked about, one of my favourite books. So the, the idea of a, a female character whose world is kind of fracturing,

• 43:49Speaker 01

  whose sense of reality is kind of fracturing, he feels under tremendous intolerable pressure. And actually, another book, I was thinking about this while I was reading particularly the New York sections, J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. So the cynical, slightly flat narration, the deadpan, wry humour of Holden Caulfield of J D Salinger's narrator. You can see that Esther's narration is not wholly dissimilar, I would say. And a sort of sense of a teenager disillusioned and caustic about their world. So she wrote it in, what, mid sixty one?

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, the summer of nineteen sixty one, she wrote it very quickly. So then she finished it and she submitted the manuscript to Harper and Row in the US. It was turned down flat. Their editors declared it disappointing, juvenile and overruled. But with her typical doggedness, she then submitted it to the British publisher, William Heinemann. Later, Faber and Faber, they agreed to publish it and she was closely involved with editing it, working on it right until it was approved for printing. And she chose to publish it under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to protect her privacy, but also the privacy of all the people that, you know, she had based her characters on very closely.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And it was published in January nineteen sixty three under the pseudonym. And then she died twenty eight days later, so she never saw it published under the name Sylvia Plath. And she never saw her wonderful poetry collection, Ariel, published.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, which was published later, wasn't it? And at first, when the book came out, not a great reaction. People were kind of polite about it, they didn't hate it, but they weren't, you know, they weren't enormously blown away by it. And then what happened, it was Ariel that changed it, wasn't it? So Ariel came out, what, nineteen sixty five, two years later? And Ariel, because of it, it is so, feels so like a sort of.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Confessional.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I'm trying not to use the word raw, but raw is the word. Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It's extremely emotionally exposed.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  That is actually, to just say that, I think, is doing it a disservice because it's also so tight, you know? She has a wonderful way with imagery and meter, I think.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  The tendency, when you're talking about authors like this, who write slightly confessional things about the darker things that happen to you, suffering and stuff, is that you actually miss the craft that goes into it. I mean, this is the case in our, the very first episode, we did the show Wuthering Heights, we talked about that. How people underestimate Emily Bronson's craftsmanship as a writer. And I think they do that with Sylvia Plath as well.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Anyway, so The Bell Jar finally comes out in sixty six under her own name, kind of cements her reputation. People are, oh my God, it's the same, same woman who wrote Ariel, those poems.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  They're chuffed with her.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And yeah, and at late sixty's, she becomes this literary legend, this kind of icon. Of course, easier to do that when the author is no longer around, you can project all kinds of things onto her. And of course, this is also the moment where the feminist movement is really kind of getting going. So she's a, you know, she becomes a kind of folk heroine for a generation of, I think, young women who are maybe the first women in their family to go to university, they feel possibly they are struggling to find their way in the world in the seventies or something. They're so conscious of the burden that society puts on them. And they look at Sylvia Plath and they say, yeah, she speaks for me, you know, this is, this is brilliant, she gets it exactly.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  So that's when it comes out in the US, isn't it? Seventy one, finally published in the US.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  People have been smuggling copies into the US because it had, had yet to be published. There's like a black market of Plath books. And her mum was very anti it being published, actually, in the US because she thought it was, it was ungrateful to the people that Plath was writing about.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Well, you can see how if they recognise themselves that closely, it's.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  A bit close to home.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be a bit close to home. Anyway, Tabby, we should absolutely take a break. We've been talking far too long, as is I want. We shall talk about the book itself, we'll get into the book, about the world it depicts after the break, and we'll also, of course, come to the death and afterlife of Sylvia Plath. So we will see you then.

• 48:03Speaker 02

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• 49:52Speaker 01

  Welcome back, everybody, to the book club. Now, would you like to join a community of brilliant people frustrated by the expectations of modern society like me and Tabby? I bet you would. Well, we have such a thing. It's the people who read our newsletter, Book Club Notes. So this newsletter comes out every Saturday. I know people are probably sick of us talking about this, but we want as many people to read it as possible because we know there are, we know because we see the data, we know there are loads of people who are listening to this show and not subscribing to the newsletter. It is free. There's, you lose nothing. Subscribe to the newsletter. Genuinely, it's really good. You get stuff from us. You get lots of talking points about the book.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Deep dives.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Deep dives into the book. There's also, the brilliant thing about this newsletter, which has really taken off, is that there are so many comments from listeners and readers, people saying, oh, have you thought about this? I think that there's some stuff about a book. If you like that, you should read this, all of this kind of thing. I mean, like when we did Rebecca or Lolita, we got so many comments and it was great. So.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  You're dissolving into American capitalism, Dominic.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I know, but there's no capitalism because it's free. This is the mad thing. It's not even like a hard sell because there's no sell.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  It's so free, it's like you won't pay anything for it. It's insane.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  You literally won't pay anything for it. You sign up at thebookclubhq.com. So people sometimes say, he rushed, he rushed the description. I didn't hear what it was. You have no excuse this time. It's thebookclubhq.com. Genuinely, it's not a hard sell because it's free. Right. Back to the bell jar. Tabby, talk to me about the bell jar.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Okay, so I was just a quick word on the style of the novel because I think it's one of the best things about it. It's conversational and personal, but it's always ironic and cynical. Nothing is left unqualified. It's too sharp for any bloated sentimentality. So even the most iconic potent image of the book, which is the fig tree that we opened with, Esther herself later satirizes that. She says that the image might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach, you know, which is so funny. And it borrows the outline of a building's Roman. So this is a coming of age novel, provincial girl, big city, goes to big city disillusionment and return. But then it rejects it using the fig tree itself because rather than the typical journey

• 52:11Speaker 00

  of confusion towards self-knowing and individuation, Esther is trapped in this perpetual cycle of disassociation and confusion. And she rejects the idea of a single identity, a single moment of knowing, of self-understanding.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Right. Because in a coming of age novel, you move through different stages and you become yourself.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Little women, for instance.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Little women. Yeah, you overcome challenges and you, you reach an end point.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  And you know yourself at the end.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. This is not the case for this book. So actually, this book ends with a moment of almost uncertainty as her, she's walking into the meeting.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Well, we'll, we'll discuss this at the end because I think it's so strong.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. I don't want to jump ahead. So if we just talk about the main characters, so this is Sylvia Plath's avatar, who is Esther Greenwood. In the film, you're very excited about this film, Tabby, because Billie Eilish is. Yeah. You're a big Billie Eilish fan?

• 53:02Speaker 00

  I just think, I'm not a massive Billie Eilish fan, truth be told, but I think, I do think it makes sense as a casting decision, you know? Billie Eilish very much plays into the, the inner angst version of things. She kind of looks like how I imagine Esther.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Has she ever done any acting before, though?

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Not as far as I'm aware.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Big test.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Big test.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  If you set the bar quite high by appearing on the book club, that's your big test. So can Billie Eilish live up to your example?

• 53:27Speaker 00

  And that's what the world will be waiting for and wondering. Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  So Esther, I think for me, the brilliant thing about Esther is you've already hit the nail on the head. She's not one thing. She's complicated. She is different things to different people.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Unlikable sometimes, which I think is good.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  As you say, she can be sentimental, she can be cynical, she can be a typical teenager at times or a typical young woman. But then there's also moments where she resists that and she kicks against it, as we all do. She's, you mentioned Sylvia Plath and her extraordinary sandwiches. One of the things that's, that's really funny about Esther, particularly in the first part of the book, is when she's talking about food.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Oddly intense relationship with food.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, she eats a whole lobster, doesn't she, at her lunch for a magazine?

• 54:18Speaker 00

  A decorous lady's lunch.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's, there's like crab meat, avocado. I mean, of course, some of this ends very badly when they all get, well, I love this. So they all get this food poisoning, don't they? And this is a really, really well-written, almost slightly sort of dreamlike chapter.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Where they all get this, they've been eating crab meat salad, the interns. And it's funny and it's clever because, you know, this is a consumerist fantasy. This is a 1950s magazine fantasy of being an intern for a magazine. Everybody's very glossy. Everybody's well-turned-out. It's in New York. It's brilliant. You're eating this fancy food. And then you spend the evening, all the girls.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Who are such sort of sex objects and stuff and so glamorous and desirable.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Beautifully turned out.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they basically all spend the evening being sick.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Esther says she feels purged afterwards and purged and holy. Perhaps an indication there of some of her anxieties, I guess, and some of her issues. Because she, this is sort of self-loathing about having gone in for this world, I think. And actually, when she does come home and when she succumbs to her depression, when her depression overtakes her, she doesn't want to eat, does she? So which is a kind of sign that things are wrong. And Esther, the, the thing about her is everybody thinks she's brilliant. So she's been obviously very smart at school. She has a boyfriend, you know, she has friends.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  She's everything she's meant to be as a girl at her stage of life. And therefore the expectation is you have everything required of you to be content. And there's nothing worse than to be expected to be happy when you inexplicably not.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And part of it is an unhappiness that she carries within her because of the death of her father. I mean, that definitely comes through, doesn't it? And that reflects Sylvia Plath's own life. I mean, we talked about the poem Daddy. Part of it is that, that it's in her.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Part of it is also a very, you said, relatable, a very relatable thing, which is that she has reached, you know, she's reached this point where she's university age and whatnot, but she doesn't know what she wants to do.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. She doesn't know which path to choose in life. You know, she, she wants to always be allowed to be herself and do what she wants to do. But she's also desperate to fit in and meet expectations. She also fears that she'll lose control and just be propelled. She'll lose her free will and she'll just be propelled into a particular course that she doesn't really want. She'll be forced to take a fig. So she says, I wasn't steering anything, not even myself, I just bumped. So, you know, this brings us back to the opening reading. She says, you know, with so many futures open to me, if I choose one, I will lose all the rest forevermore.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, close up all the others.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Which is a frightening thing for a bright, intelligent, ambitious young woman. And because of this, because of her inability to choose and decide what or who she wants to be, she spends a lot of the, the novel kind of trying on different identities, playing with her identity, forging alternative realities. So there's a point in the novel where she pretends to be called Ellie Higginbottom of Chicago. And then she's always imagining what it would be like to be the other girls doing the magazine internship with her, so Doreen, Betsy. And she always tells people one thing because she wants to give a certain impression, but she knows full well in the back of her mind, she says it quite openly, I know I'll never do that.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  So for instance, she keeps telling everyone because she thinks it sounds impressive that she wants to learn German, but she knows she never will. Or she sits down to write a book at one point. There's actually a private joke here from Sylvia Plath because Esther says, my heroine would be myself only in disguise, a six-lettered name, as Esther is to Plath. But she never manages to write a word.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  And I'm sure lots of people do that at that age. You know, you say, well, I mean, obviously I'm going to achieve this and obviously, you know, I'm going to, you know, learn Greek or whatever it is. And actually, maybe you know, because even though you're at that time of life where you feel that everything is possible, you still know deep down it's impossible.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a sense, isn't there, on your, that age, that. The world is open to you, but you are overwhelmed by the possible choice.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Paralysed.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  You absolutely, I mean, you're dead right. You worry that you choose one thing and it closes off all the other options. So you are frozen, but also a sense that, uh, you know, things that, that, an anxiety that things are slipping away from you, that somebody else, everybody else has chosen and you haven't.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  The world is moving on and you're going to be left behind and you've got nowhere to go. I think a wonderful passage actually is where the, this woman, J C, she's the magazine editor, I think.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  She asks, uh, Esther, what do you want to do? And Esther says, I don't really know. I felt deep shock hearing myself say that because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. And she says, says this lovely line, she says, it feels like the knowledge that she doesn't know what to do feels like there's been a bloke hanging around your door all this time and you sort of knew deep down he was your real father. But you didn't want to admit it.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  So well done.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Again, the stuff about the father, about who your father is.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  But you know, so kind of dislocated does she feel, so untethered that she actually, she's actually physically transformed, like at one point, a very heartbreaking moment, um, after she's, um, attempted to commit suicide. She's given a mirror and she holds it up and the way that it's written, it's written as though she's describing a stranger. She has no idea that it's her. She doesn't recognise herself. You know, her head's been shaved. She, you know, she says, one side of the person's face was purple and bulged out in a shapish way. The person's mouth was pale brown with a rose coloured saw at either corner, you know?

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Tragically alienated from herself. And all of this begins when she finds herself untethered in New York after, as we had described, all these years of hard work, knowing where she stood, knowing how she, knowing how she fitted in, knowing what she had to achieve, good grades, basically. And then discovering that all of that is totally irrelevant and pointless in the real world.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So she's basically, she's done fantastically well and, um, she, she just is frozen and crushed almost by the realisation that nothing that she has done now really matters, that it was all, you know, it was all, it wasn't empty. That's not right. But it's, it, it hasn't set her up neatly for this sort of easy career. So there's a moment when the interns are all told, please pose for a picture with a prop. And the prop will reflect your future aspirations.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  But isn't that so reductive, you know, sum up your whole future with one object, you know?

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, some people, did you not know people at university and stuff who knew what they wanted to do, who were like completely single minded?

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Um, some, but a lot of people changed. That's the thing. And I think Esther knows that, yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  But, I mean, I didn't know really what I wanted to do. So I would have probably, I mean, God, I'm mad. I mean, how depressing if there was some photo of me.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  All those years training to be a ballet dancer for naught.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  I know, it's such, it's a timeless tale, Dominic, and I feel for you.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  What would you be posing with, Tabby?

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  I don't know, like a mallet.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  A mallet? What were you hoping to be?

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Someone that tore down their fellow presenters and used to come.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Thanks. Yeah. Stiletto.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  But anyway, she says, uh, the only thing I was ever good at was winning scholarships and prizes and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks where a champion college footballer suddenly confronted with Wall Street in a business suit. His days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantle with a date engraved on it like that, like the date on a tombstone. It's very good writing. You like, at this point, you claim that this is very relatable and this is how you.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's relatable.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  So did you regard yourself, you regarded yourself as a champion racehorse?

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  No, definitely not. Cause I, I, I wasn't particularly high achieving when I was in the educational system. But I definitely remember, I definitely remember, you know, you, you've been in institutions for so long, you know, like what you need to do to meet the quota.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Um, and then I remember coming out and it was also kind of COVID and being like at home a lot with totally clueless as to what I really wanted to do. And trying to be realistic about the fact that what I really liked doing was like reading books and writing essays and stuff like that. And that that was going to serve me not one iota in the real world.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  You were wrong. You were wrong, Tabby.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  I, I actually was wrong. Yeah. I actually was wrong. But, I mean, what, what I went through was nothing on what I, it was nothing with what, I mean, in comparison to what Esther's faced with, because she's in 1950s America, which is a very fixed patriarchy, where women have expectations of them. They have roles that they're meant to step into. You know, it doesn't matter if they've had fantastic educations and degrees and they're really bright. They've got to be housewives, domestic, you know? And, and this is, these are always big themes in class poetry, you know, the struggle between these, these two sides of life, the traditional and the, uh, more subversive.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  If I can jump in for a second about the historical context, in case listeners are interested in me, if you're not interested, you know, do something else in the next moment. But actually, the reason that this is the case is because the two world wars had been so dislocating for, you know, gender relations in America. That after men return, I mean, this is the truth, this is the case in other Western countries as well. When men return in 1945, and this is sort of getting back to normal. I think there's a general sense, you know, right, let's get, you know, things have been very chaotic and women have been going into factories and, you know, men have been unmanned and all of this kind of thing.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  So let's really get back to a conservative, settled, fixed, family unit, nuclear family kind of world. And so actually, in some ways, the 1950s are more conformist than the decades that went before them.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  It's like your reactionary, right? Aren't you?

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  I mean, for instance, I found, I was looking through, um, the ads from the period. I mean, you spoke about Mad Men. And for instance, like a classic was this tomato ketchup bottle and the tagline is, you mean a woman can open it? Without a knife, blade, a bottle opener, or even a husband? And that's like, that's classic with a very skinny waisted woman kind of smiling at the camera like, I don't mind.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. So there's the very famous passage, isn't there? And there's somebody about to get married, Tabby, this must, this must haunt you. This must haunt you.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  The blue jobs and the pink jobs. Um, yeah, because, I mean, Esther dreads, uh, domestic drudgery. And so she meets this young man and she imagines what it will mean to marry him. Let's hope I'm not looking into a looking glass. It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed. And then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day, he'd expect a big dinner. And I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates. So I fell into bed utterly exhausted.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Oh my word. Well, thank goodness.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Quite a bleak prospect, isn't it?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Thank goodness you're the breadwinner in your household.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Exactly. Thank goodness I'm marrying an aspiring writer. And that to me, actually, when I read that passage, instantaneously, I was like, that is, that is my vision of 1950s America. Have, you know, you've never seen Pleasantville, but in the first half of the movie before, um, it goes from black and white into colour. That is the, the, the mother's daily routine. I mean, that's Samantha's daily routine in Bewitched.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Right. And she has this fear with this by Buddy Willard.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Buddy Willard.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Who's going to be a doctor and she thinks it will be a dreary and wasted life for a girl with, um, 15 years of straight A's. And she looks at Buddy Willard's mother, doesn't she? And she says basically what she does is cook and clean and wash from morning till night. And I do not want that.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and his mother had a promising career, um, as a teacher and then now look at her and she's basically a full-time housewife and she's become very, very conservative. She's very disapproving of women following other paths. So because of all this, Esther's very, feels, it feels imprisoned, you know?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  She fears losing herself. And yet, as we said, she's still a teenager seeking to fit in, preoccupied with fitting in. And so one of her main, a, a big obsession of hers in the novel is losing her virginity. Cause she feels burdened by it. She sees sex all around her. She doesn't want to be left out. But she's terrified of falling pregnant because she thinks that motherhood will diminish her and rob her of her aspirations. You know, and yet she wants to fit in and, and, and so she, she says, I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children, I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Again, she gives up her true dream in order to become a mother.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  She, she worries that it will be just an image. She says, I worry that if I had kids and I married, I would be going around numb as a slave in some private totalitarian state.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  She loves the fascistic language.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, she does. But I mean, she's writing the 1950s, you know, the fascistic language, the sort of, also the totalitarian, you know, this is the age of McCarthyism, as we said, so it's in the air, exactly. She's cross about, I mean, she's very clear eyed, clear sighted about the hypocrisy of, you know, what's fine for a man is not fine for a woman. So Buddy's mother expects that, um, Esther will stay pure before her marriage. But Buddy, because he's a young man, can sow his wild oats, all that sort of thing. Also, she's very clear sighted about the different opportunities for men and women. So a wonderful line, a man is an arrow into the future and a woman is the place that the arrow shoots off from.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  I mean, that goes back to the thing we were saying about how for so many writers of this period, the post-war period, you know, their lives are facilitated by the wife in the background doing all the work for them so that they can sit around typing. Tabby, it's like a vision of your life.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  I know. I wish, I wish I could say I could relate, but actually I feel like, I feel like, I feel like I get the, the, the like proper nice treatment.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  You reckon?

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. My fiance is very domestic, so I'm quite lucky in that way.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Well, Tabby's having a wonderful time, like, you know, talking to her favourite person on, on, on the podcast.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  I've actually got a key card fan. Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. No one else can see this, but I know it's happening. There's a bloke, there's a really depressed looking bloke like doing all the washing up and dealing with the maggots in the background.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  Shame, he gets such a hard time. He gets a hard time. Oh, yeah. Well, the maggots that he brought into the picture, I'm just saying. Gets such a hard time on air, at the live shows, but actually, yeah, he, he's the genius behind the scenes.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  So just on Esther, one last point about Esther, Tabby, do you see her as a feminist? Is she a standard bearer of feminism? I'm not sure she really is. She doesn't have any real sense of that, does she?

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  No, I think again, that would be flattening. It would be, um, a bit reductive. Because she's not in any way apparent, because again, she's multi-dimensional. She's not just one thing. There's a lot about her that's unlikable. She sees herself slightly above all the other girls who she homogenises. You know, in quite a sexist way, possibly. She sort of fetishises her difference. She's proud of the fact that she's disgusted by and sees through the things that they seem to idolise.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  She and the bell jar have actually come under fire for moments of quite racist language and stereotypes for this, for instance, as a moment when Esther is horrible and so rude to this man that's serving them in her first asylum that she's at. She's very unkind to this character Joan, who joins Esther in her final mental institution. And Joan kind of makes the possibly lesbianic move on her. And Esther's just like, I don't like you. She's catty.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that, but the thing is, it's mad to criticize either Esther or the book for that, I think. Because basically Esther is a complicated, real, in inverted commas, real person who's not a saint.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  Her characterization is so much richer for it, you know, because what Sylvia Plath isn't allowing us to do is angelicize mental illness and depression, or show it as something romantic and painless and like beautiful, you know, like Lizzie Sidle or something in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings, pale and wan and tragic. She's showing it's, you know, rooted in a real human being who's flawed and it's physically, in many ways, repulsive and unglamorous.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  And I think that's important.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  I agree with you completely. It does, I would say it doesn't glamorize.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Depression. It doesn't glamorize being institutionalized or any of these kind of things. It makes it horrific, like when she looks at herself in the mirror and is all the better for it, actually. I mean, Esther doesn't, Esther doesn't want to be depressed.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  No, she's desperate to be free. And actually, it would be doing so many people that had suffered similar things, such a disservice if she did, because it would glamorize what is a truly horrible, grotesque, destructive experience.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the sense of hopelessness, the sense of despair, the sense of being enclosed. And that takes us obviously to the image of the bell jar, doesn't it?

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  To the central image. Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the bell jar, there were lots of images of imprisonment in the book. So actually, there was one, I was reading, rereading it this morning. The bit when, you know, she's told she hasn't got on the writing course, which is the bit that really pushes her down, down, down, kind of underwater, as it were. She says then, when she finds out she doesn't get the writing course, that the car roof closed over my head like the roof of a prison van. And she looks at the houses, the white clapboard houses with the interstices of well-greamed green, one bar after another, in a large but escape-proof cage, in the sense of being hemmed in. But the thing that really captures this is obviously the image of the jar. So it's transparent, everyone can see you, everyone's looking at you, you know, the glass jar

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  that descends over you. It blocks out the air, it's like a vacuum.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  You can't breathe. Yeah.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  You can't breathe, exactly. You can see the world out too, but you can't engage in it. You're cut off, which is obviously how lots of people feel when they're depressed, that they can't communicate. And but also, it's this sort of sense of everything is distorted and you cannot escape. It's, you're, you're under the bell jar, wherever you go, whatever you do. So it's almost dreamlike, I suppose, to some extent, isn't it?

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, a dreadful waking dream. So she says, to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. Wherever I sat, on the deck of the ship, or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok, I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. And I think some of the most affecting parts of this book are those middle sections, when she is truly under the jar.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  And because we're always inside her head, we live it alongside her. And it's important to say that it's not dramatic, you don't get much of a sense of kind of emotional escalation. It's awfully apathetic. She is awfully apathetic and numb. And that's what's so dreadful, is it's not the deep purples or the deep blues of like agony or loss or grief or sadness, it's the continuous grey of depression. It's something different. She says, I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that settled one blocks from the next had suddenly snapped up.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  And I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's very well done, that image, I think. And that sort of sense of the days, she keeps a tally of them, doesn't she? Because she basically stops washing her hair, she stops washing her clothes, she stops eating and sleeping. And she's sort of, I haven't washed my hair for three weeks, I haven't slept for seven nights, 14 nights, I haven't slept for 21 nights.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Because what's the point?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But, well, in terms of the help that she gets, her mother doesn't really understand her and doesn't quite approve of her, does she? I mean, her mother is just bewildered by it. The first doctor, Dr. Gordon, I mean, he gives her the first course of electroconvulsive therapy. And this is a.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  Terrible turning point.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  A terrible turning point. So she shuts her eyes, she says, there's a brief silence, like an in-drawn breath. And something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee, it shrilled through an air crackling with blue light. And with each flash, a great jolt drugged me until I thought my bones would break. And the saps fly out at me like a split plant. And then, it's like, it's a punishment, it's a torture. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Which is so sad, because she's done nothing, you know, it's making her feel like her illness is something she should be feel guilty for. It's tragic.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  On the electroconvulsive therapy, people who knew Sylvia Plath said, you know, that's, she felt that that had been one of the great traumatic moments of her life, that first course of ECT. Ted Hughes, you know, when he was talking about the bell jar, said, that's what really lay behind it, that experience.

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Which left a scar that never really healed.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you can sense that in that passage, can't you? It's horribly visceral, God. But this experience, and I suppose the culmination of her, of her sense of dislocation, her depression, culminates in Esther contemplating various means of killing herself. She finds that she's unable to hurt herself physically. So like Sylvia Plath, she calls into a hole in her mother's basement and overdoses on sleeping pills. And it's the way that the scene plays out that I was struck by, because it's calm, it's a matter of fact. Everything she does in the build up to it is meticulously performed. She puts things back exactly where she took them from. So while she's about to enact a shocking act of self-destruction, the language that Plath uses

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  is mundane, unchanged. So it's as though life is droning on, no matter what Esther does, no matter that she's about to leave.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  That's the chilling thing. It's the flatness, the hollowness of the writing there, the very flat, unsentimental, almost unemotional way that she writes about it. That's what makes it so powerful, I think, is the scene.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. But then she finds the darkness of the cellar that she calls into comforting, like velvet. So it's almost as though she's about to find relief, she's about to go to bed.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Then she wakes up in hospital to darkness, because she thinks she's blind, but she's got bandages wrapped around her head. So it's as though she's gone from darkness back into darkness. The bell jar is still above her. There's no, you know, moment of enlightenment, relief, great healing. And then this leads us into the final section of the book, which mainly takes place in mental institutions.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. So psychiatric hospitals. So this, you know, it's full of, you'd have to, you can sense this is written by somebody who's been in this world, the world of the wards, of the treatments, of the nurses and so on. You know, this is a high point of institutionalization in America. A couple of decades later, it would be reversed, people, they would try to, not to have people in institutions. But in the 50s and 60s, these places are kind of creaking under the weight of people who are being institutionalized.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  And yet, in society, it was not embraced, was it? You were kind of ostracized if it was revealed that you'd been in a mental institution or something like that.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Of course. Yeah, of course. Dr. Nolan says to her at one point, people will shy away from you. You will, they will, they will treat you gingerly or even avoid you like a leper with a warning bell. And she says, she knows that her mother would be, is ashamed, is so ashamed. A daughter in an asylum, I had done that to her. So she feels guilty, which is, which is of course awful. It's, you know.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  But it's often how people do feel in that, in that, in that position. So she has the new doctor, Dr. Nolan, who is much kinder. And actually, this is interesting. Dr. Nolan says, you won't ever have to have that again, that kind of treatment. But then, actually, Dr. Nolan does give her the treatment again, which Esther is very, at first, horrified by, feels betrayed, feels she's been lied to.

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  This institution that she's at is actually very comfortable, she likes the routines, she likes the food. So she's lulled into, you know. She's on the road to recovery, I guess. And then, as you say, she feels so betrayed when this is raised to her again as a treatment.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  But this, so the book is not totally damning about the treatment.

• 1:19:33Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Because actually, the treatment in the second place, the treatment by Dr Nolan, is clearly done with a sense of care and compassion.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  In a way that the previous treatment wasn't, don't you think? And actually, Sylvia Plath, this is not a book that is basically, there are, there's a whole load of books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or something.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Which are attacking institu-, you know.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Mental health institutions, yeah.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. This is not one of them, I wouldn't have said. Actually, the portrait is more nuanced.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  No, it's a nice, it's a nice hospital that she's at. The patients are allowed certain freedoms. As you say, Dr Nolan is a really benevolent character. She actively helps Esther to recover and to understand her condition because she is a woman and she understands it from a woman's perspective. A real turning point in Esther's recovery is when Dr Nolan prescribed her contraception, which was very unusual at the time still. Because she realizes that Esther is terrified of motherhood but wants to lose her virginity and fit in. And Dr Nolan is based on Ruth Boucher, who was Plath's therapist who helped her. And Nolan does help Esther regain clarity. She does help Esther to escape the bell jar a little.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  That's, and re-enter the world as Esther does. She goes back to school, like to college. She loses her virginity, but it's actually not a straightforward ending by any means. It's brilliantly unsatisfactory. It's ambiguous. It's sort of unfinished. Because yes, the bell jar has been raised, but it still hangs suspended and a few feet above my head, she says. With the question left hanging with it, how did I know that someday at college in Europe, somewhere, anywhere, the bell jar with its stifling distortions wouldn't descend again? And that's a painfully apt portrait, I think, of depression because it is that black dog that, dog that always comes out. It can never truly be mastered or got rid of, but yeah, it can be survived and people can thrive afterwards, but it's not.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  It would be so belittling to say, oh, there are just these happy endings. And like any other illness, you can just turn a new leaf and you're absolutely fine for the rest of your life.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  And for instance, there's this terrible, an unpleasant reminder, I suppose, of that is that Joan, this, this girl that Esther is at this institution with, we find out later that she has actually taken her own life. So it's a nasty warning of what could be. It's not totally dark, is it? Because she does survive.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  She has a second birth. She still is. She still exists. She says, I am, I am, I am. There's the threat of the bell jar, but there's also the possibility of a long, bright life.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you know, this is, I mean, this is so interesting, isn't it? Because actually, the book ends on an ambiguous note, but one that I think leads us to be more optimistic than not.

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  Yes. I, I, I thought it was optimistic, really.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  You've quite, I think you're dead right that a couple of pages earlier, she says, the bell jar could descend again at any moment. So we don't, we're not, you know, it's not like happily ever after. But it ends with Dr Nolan coming to her and touching her on the shoulder. It's a lovely little sort of moments of compassion and fellowship. And then basically leading her in to see all the people in this sort of meeting who are going to, the doctors are basically going to discuss about, you know, is she, is she ready to go? Is she ready to be sort of let out, as it were? Is she going to, and she describes it as being reborn. She says one point, it ought to be a ritual for being born twice.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  And if you'd read this not knowing about the author, you would say, do you know what? It was actually a reasonably happy ending.

• 1:23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you would.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  You know, maybe they've put her on the road to recovery, you know, there'll be ups and downs, but, you know, it could have been a lot worse. Of course, we read this knowing that just a month after the book was published, Sylvia Plath did take her own life.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  And it's impossible now to read it without, I mean, it would be, you almost wish you could read it without that knowledge, don't you?

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's true.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  But that knowledge really over, overshadows the ending of the book, I think. In a way that turns us into this sort of a tragic story rather than one with elements of hope, which actually takes us to what happened to Sylvia Plath, Tabby.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the, the end, the, the last portion of her life.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  After completing the bell jar in 1961, she and Ted Hughes moved to Devon. And before leaving London, they let out their flat to the Canadian poet David Weevil and his wife Asia. The couples become friends. Then Sylvia Plath discovers that Ted Hughes is having an affair with Asia and she is devastated. I mean, she is so devastated, as you would be. And then in June 1962, she drives her car off the side of a road after hearing the news. And it's debated now with her or not, this was a suicide attempt or rather maybe just like a destructive urge, a destructive release. So she and Ted initially tried to repair the relationship, but they ended up separating for good in October 1962.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  There were kind of, there was semi, there was talk of maybe resurrecting things for the last portion of her life, but it never came to anything. She missed him, though.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  But that said, his departure does inspire the most productive period of her life. This is when she composes most of the poems that make up the legendary collection, which I love, Ariel. So, you know, from that terrible despair came a beautiful thing. She returned to London in December 1962, actually full of optimism. And she's living alone with her two children and the circumstances are just, it couldn't really be worse. This is one of the coldest winters ever known in the UK.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  The big freeze.

• 1:25:20Speaker 00

  It's the big freeze, winter of 62 to 63.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, pipes freezing, everything is like, Britain is literally to stand still.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Her, her water wasn't running. She had a bathtub full of dirty water. Her children keep getting sick. By the way, they're nine months and two years old and she's alone with them, also trying to work. She keeps getting ill.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  As a single mother, I mean, that is a, that is an overwhelming, that's, that would be terrible.

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  How could anyone keep their head above the parapet with all of that going on? And she has no telephones. She's very isolated. She is really missing Ted Hughes. And so her depression and insomnia unsurprisingly return in force. She described it as owl's talons clenching my heart. She told her, her doctor that this had been going on for about six to seven months. And he prescribed her these pills, which Ted Hughes later said he thought escalated her mental deterioration because they were untested on her. This is unconfirmed. Her doctor tried to have her admitted to a hospital. She was frightened of this because of her earlier experiences. So instead, he decided to send a nurse to help her with the children. She's only 30 at this time.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the nurse is due to arrive one morning, the 11th of February, 1963, tries to get into the flat, can't get into the flat and basically just gets into the flat finally and they discover that Sylvia Plath has taken her own life and she's died of carbon monoxide poisoning. And in very, you know, characteristic fashion, she'd prepared for this meticulously. She had sealed off the kitchen from the rest of their house, the rest of the flats with tape and whatnot and cloth so that the children.

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  Would be unharmed.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Would be unharmed. And she'd left food out for the children and whatnot.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  She'd opened the windows in their bedroom. She'd left them a little note saying, call the doctor. She won't call the doctor, please. And I don't know why there's something about that. Like decorous use of please even at the very end.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's really, it's really, really sad.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Her friend, Jeanine Becker,

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  wrote in her biography of Plath that a police officer who worked for the coroner's office said there was no question whatsoever that she had, this was not a cry for help. This was a.

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  She'd meant to die.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, she meant, she, she knew exactly what she was doing. She was determined to go through with it.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  The gravestone in which both her name and the name and Ted Hughes's surname are inscribed, which is very controversial. The gravestone has an inscription, chosen by Ted Hughes, even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted. And, I mean, the gravestone itself is like, there'd been a focus of kind of vandalism and, you know, people trying to scratch his, the word Hughes off, off the tombstone. And there was a huge cottage industry, basically, of people either saying Ted Hughes is a monster and it's all his fault.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  She wouldn't have died if it hadn't been for him, kind of thing.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Or people, including, it has to be said, their daughter.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, Frida.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Frida, who say, he has been turned into a stage villain by the, I mean, Ted Hughes himself effectively said by the Sylvia Plath industry, has cast me as this villain and there's nothing I can ever do that will, or say that will make them look on me differently or to see that it was more complicated or whatever. To be completely honest, it's one of those things that I look at and I think I could probably spend 10 years reading about this and I still would be none the wiser because as we said before, I don't believe that you can ever really know what happens in somebody else's.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Relationship. And, you know, being judgmental about it so long after the fact doesn't really seem to me a terribly productive thing to do.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and also, you know, he's, he's been widely criticized as the executor of her estate because he destroyed some of her journals. He said to protect his children.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  He also reordered Ariel. It was left by her bedside table. And she wanted it to start with the word love and end with the word hope. And he put a slightly darker spin on it, whatever it may be. I think you're right. Like, I've read so much about this. You can read and read and read and it's difficult to make a judgment. There's so much that's unknown. But also I think, I think we're missing the point as well. Of course, she was a remarkable person with an interesting life, but it's her writing that. You know, really lives on. And thanks to the beljar and Ariel, she has been turned into this literary legend. She means a lot to many people. It's a feminist martyr. You know, someone that examined and criticised gender expectations. She's been viewed as an

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  artist who was driven to take her own life by an oppressive husband and a pre-feminist world. She's seen as a tragic heroine, this troubled genius. I think there's probably truth in all of those portraits, but I also feel like that's probably a little bit reductive. I, I, I feel like her, her death, the circumstances of her death, her marriage have been sensationalised to the point that I think they've come to overshadow the kind of gregariousness of her character, her wit, um, how remarkably intelligent she was. And above all, you know, she is someone that spoke openly and honestly and wittily about depression. But, but, but above all, I

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  think she was an excellent, brilliant writer who was extremely hardworking and a superb poet. And that's, that's, I mean, we're doing this episode to talk about her work really, more than her.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed, agreed completely. And I will say, on the book, I actually found the book really enjoyable. It is not, I did not find it a miserable, uh, I didn't actually find it miserable and angst ridden. And I didn't find it hard work. I was, as I said, I was reading on holiday and I looked forward to when I would get back into it because it was, as you say, it was written with a kind of dry humour often and a beautiful, um, use of language. It's not indulgent, quite neat, kind of controlled portraits of people.

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  It's neat.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I thought, I, I, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. So Tabby, what are we marking this? What's our scale?

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  So I think we'd be doing ourselves and Sylvia Plath a disservice if we did rate it in her beloved deluxe peanut butter sandwiches spiced with onion.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my word. That's, that's the worst thing you've said.

• 1:31:37Speaker 00

  Peanut butter bacon sandwiches spiced with onion. Yeah.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and mayonnaise. So I am going to give it, uh, eight.

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Now, I'm not being, I'm taking two marks off. People say, why didn't you give it 10? I'm not giving it 10 because I, I have no problem with the book at all. I mean, there's nothing I would criticise. It didn't actually haunt me. It didn't linger in my head as much as I thought it perhaps would. I think that's partly because the style is quite laconic.

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  And it's not because precisely because it's not self-indulgent, actually, um, because it's quite controlled. And I perhaps didn't feel a sense of the, uh, the, the rage, the sheer anguish that I might have done. However, that, I mean, I'm not, it would be bonkers for me to criticise the book for that because obviously it's a classic for a reason. It means a lot to a lot of people. And I think it is actually, do you know what, Tabby? It's exactly the kind of book that I would never have read if I hadn't done this show. And I'm really glad that I did. So.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, you owe me so much.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I recommend it. I recommend it to the listeners. What about you?

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

  I think I'm going to give it nine because I think it's always important to reward books on the basis of just how much you enjoyed reading them. And as you say, it's not all doom and gloom and angst. And I really enjoyed reading it. Like, I found it a lovely, easy, not lovely maybe, but suddenly that, an easy read. You wanted to pick it up and get back into it, you know, but I'm just going to dock one mark maybe because as you say, because it is so tight and sharply written and controlled, uh, you almost would have needed kind of one moment of emotional explosion, uh, or something to contrast that. Um, but it's a really, really great book, really enjoyable read, very well written. So there we go.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, um, so what do we have coming up? A reminder, as if I didn't hector the listeners enough that they should sign up for that newsletter at bookclubhq.com.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  Book Club Notes. Sign up at bookclubhq.com. Hugely exciting.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  It sort of shambles the way we actually do these calls to action, as they are technically known.

• 1:33:47Speaker 00

  CTAs. Um, so what do we have coming up? We have White Nights by Theodore Dostoevsky, Um, The Shining by Stephen King, Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Money by Martin Amis.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  So some brilliant, brilliant books there.

• 1:34:04Speaker 00

  Big line up.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Right. Uh, thank you very much, Tabby.

• 1:34:09Speaker 00

  I'm off to eat a deluxe peanut butter sandwich spiced with onion and bacon. See you next time.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  I feared you would say that. I feared, I was hoping you weren't going to go there, but you did. Bye bye, everybody.

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  Bye.

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