The Bell Jar Book Summary

The Bell Jar is a fiction-based novel about Esther Greenwood, a college student who aspires to be a poet. She is chosen for a month-long summer job as a guest editor at Ladies' Day magazine, but her stay in New York City is unfulfilling as she grapples with identity and societal conventions.

She meets two other interns, the rebellious and sexual Doreen and the wholesome and virginal Betsy, who represent opposing the ideas of femininity as well as Esther's own internal problems. During the internship, Esther feels neither stimulated nor excited by the work, fashion, and big-city lifestyle that her peers in the program seem to adore. She finds herself struggling to feel anything at all aside from anxiety and disorientation.

Esther is thinking about her lover, Buddy Willard, and how angry she was when he acknowledged he wasn't a virgin and claimed to have been seduced. She thinks he's a hypocrite because he pretended to be more sexually experienced than she is. Esther must spend the rest of her summer at home with her mother after being denied for a writing class; Esther's father died when she was a child. She tries to write a novel and gets progressively miserable, attempting suicide on multiple occasions. She eventually overdoses on the sleeping pills but manages to survive.