Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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I have a general theory that a poet should always write at least one novel, and novelist should mostly avoid writing poetry. Some novelists I like have written some serviceable poetry like John Updike or Margaret Atwood or Marge Piercy. Some novelists have written excellent poetry like DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, but that’s much more rare. But man, the poets who have written good to great novels is all over the place. This is just simply one of the premier examples. This is the […]

Rings a Bell (bingo, classics)

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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I may be the only person in the world to say this, but I somehow wasn’t the right age to read The Bell Jar – THE book about depressed young women navigating their way into adulthood from a charmed childhood – as a college student.  I think I needed the distance of adulthood to recognize myself in Esther Greenwood. I hated this book the first time I read it because I had emerged from a grief-induced depression the year before and none of Esther’s experiences […]

Mary Ventura

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath

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I guess I should start this off by very emphatically stating that I love Sylvia Plath, especially The Bell Jar, but also her poetry. But whoever thought that there was any meaningful reason to publish this story in a hardback book is not a responsible steward of her literary legacy. It actively works against a good interpretation of that role and harms her status. This is a story she wrote as an undergrad, and it was rejected. It should have been rejected from publication. It’s […]

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

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Birthday/cbr10bingo  Sylvia Plath was born Oct. 27, 1932. Bingo #2 Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s experience of depression and mental illness, her time in an institution and her slow journey back to wellness. It is also a commentary on the suffocating life of a young woman who wants more than life seems to offer her because of her class and gender. The Bell Jar was published in the UK in 1963, just before Plath committed suicide. The […]

Every woman adores a Fascist

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I found this beautiful version of Ariel at Hebden Bridge, a little town just beneath the hill where Plath is buried at Heptonstall. Later I would later hike up there and see the two churches, the old one, burned down or deteriorated by time, and the new one that seemed dull to me compared to the expanse of a forgotten church. I didn’t know she was buried there so I walked right past her with her book in my bag. In the dullest of conclusion […]

An early foremother of my feminist literary experience

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Back in high school, I hadn’t discovered the word “feminist” yet, but I had discovered the word “suffragette.” For my American history research paper in 11th grade/Junior year, I wrote about suffragettes and I wore a pantsuit for my presentation (I had no idea that Pantsuit Nation would be a part of my life sixteen years later, nor that I would still not live to see a female president of the United States). That Spring, for my English III research project, I decided to write […]



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