Status Updates From Sylvia Plath w Nowym Jorku....

'It is ironic that she chose the title, The Bell Jar, to symbolize how she felt being the subject of medical scrutiny. I believe she was the one who was the observer of people, and obviously others came up short of her expectations.'
~ Lauren Totten, one of Plath's fellow guest editors on Mademoiselle

'By the early 1950s, electroshock therapy was mainstream and was administered without sedatives or anaesthesia. Sylvia was fully awake during these treatments, and she experienced full-blown convulsions.'

Female readers' responses to a magazine article on women's ambition in 1956:

'There is something unnatural and frightening in this behaviour... It is against order and I really think humanity.'

'I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man's job.'

'In a rare moment of weakness, Sylvia had started to unravel.'

'Mademoiselle put their guest editors to work immediately with the celebrity interview... Mademoiselle matched [Sylvia] up with the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen.'

'[Sylvia] broke her leg in a skiing accident.'

'The girl about town was an appealing alternative to the wife and mother in training. Not only did these fashion features encourage young women to pursue careers, they were a subtle push towards self-discovery.'

'Barbizon girls steamed with ambition and anxiety, eager to join the ranks of the hotel's most famous resident, Grace Kelly.'

'The stark facts of Sylvia Plath's suicide have led to decades of reductionist writing about her'
~ Introduction

'You are twenty... The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, the jelly bean.'
~ Epigraph, from Plath's journals, 14 November, 1952