Do you ever feel like everyone is watching you? Watching for your mistakes and fears? That’s exactly how Esther Greenwood feels in The Glass Jar. Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical story tells the journey of a young woman in a cruel world, trapped by the inner spirals of her mind.

    A ‘scholarship girl’, Esther is awarded a dream internship in New York after winning another writing contest. Along with eleven other girls, she seems to be living a dream, exchanging one posh soiree for another.

    In her heart, she knows she should be happy, but in her mind, all she can think about is her misery. As Esther finally concludes her month-long adventure in the city, the façade of happiness soon disappears altogether. Without any aim, purpose, or contests to enter, Esther is left to wallow in her relentless thoughts and anxiety.

    Plath artfully and beautifully uses common language to paint a picture that is at once horrifying as it is intriguing. During a time when mental health was taboo, she broke down the boundaries, helping normalize a once forbidden topic.

    We are right alongside Esther as her feelings of helplessness and powerlessness consume her. The characters in Plath’s novels walk in and out of Esther’s life with the same uncanny peculiarity of our own lives. The writing glides off the page. 

    After everything Esther has been through, we are left with the belief that things may turn out alright after all. What is literature if not to provide the tiniest ounce of hope?