These are the events upon which The Bell Jar, her only published novel, is based.įifty-five years after its publication, The Bell Jar continues to have a cultural hold. Two months later, in August, an exhausted Plath attempted suicide for the first time, taking sleeping pills and crawling underneath her family’s house. It was in New York that Plath strengthened her tendency to hide emotions other than servile happiness. But she also navigated the complicated codes of 1950s America, the demand for a Betty Draper–esque perfection articulated in Mad Men and The Feminine Mystique. On one hand, she faced the expectations for professional excellence typically associated with the New York publishing world, as highlighted in works like The Devil Wears Prada and Younger. She had won the magazine’s annual contest and was offered a guest editorship, along with 19 other young women. In June 1953, Sylvia Plath was a 20-year-old summer intern at Mademoiselle, living in New York between her junior and senior years of college.
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