Robin Peel explains the resonance of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in The Bell Jar. As the event fades into history, its extraordinary impact on 1950s American psychology can easily be forgotten. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs for espionage is important to Plath’s novel because of the resonance of their Jewishness, insider/outsider status and apparent vindication of Cold War paranoia. In addition, Peel reads the event from a retrospective and transatlantic perspective. The thirty year old adult woman writing in the persona of senior student mirrors the simultaneous political engagement and distancing that has troubled so many readers.

Contemporary readers tend to view The Bell Jar through a post-feminist lens. Kate Harding situates the novel within a cultural and historical moment that we too readily lose sight of. Harding reads the novel in the context of 1950s discourses in which the gendered roles that Esther resists are enforced by sexual violence. Drawing on mid-twentieth century rape laws, Harding reveals the disconnect between Esther’s view of events and the contemporary readers’. Where the latter will see acquaintance rape and female victimisation, the former will see sexual availability and victim-blaming. In her brave and original response to The Bell Jar, Harding brings to light the pervasive rape culture that underpins Esther’ss story, and reveals the importance of this underpinning to our understanding of the novel.

Taking a 1962 fan letter that Plath wrote to the poet Stevie Smith three months before her suicide, Noreen Masud elucidates a key context out of which Plath’s work emerged. Drawing on The Bell Jar and ranging through her poetry, Masud argues that Plath owes much to Smith’s gendered perspective, dramatic monologues, and ambivalent but darkly comic engagement with the stifling nature of suburbia.

Elena Rebollo-Cortés examines how the material features of Sylvia Plath’s final two books have played a key role in establishing a critical framework for the interpretation of her texts and in defining her posthumous identity as a writer. In the context of the publishing history and the literary afterlife of Plath’s works, Rebollo-Cortés shows us how the figure of Plath has been presented to readers through the visual and textual packaging of key editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar. These key works have had a wide readership and large presence in the literary market. Their editions have therefore played a major role in the creation and perpetuation of Plath’s identification with a tragic figure. This concentration on books as historical and material objects presupposes that editions are (sometimes overlooked) vehicles of meaning, revealing, for example, that editions of Ariel disclose how Plath has been portrayed as a Faber poet, a woman poet, or a myth, while editions of The Bell Jar have privileged biographical readings of the novel.

Beatrice Hitchman situates The Bell Jar within an intriguing cultural moment for gay and lesbian fiction in the United States. She provides an original and fascinating account of the novel within the context of the boom in lesbian pulp fiction of the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular psychological writings, and the lesbian bar culture in West Village during the period, all of which helped to place images of lesbians in a wider circulation. Hitchman reads Joan Gilling as a lesbian character, considering The Bell Jar in the context of lesbian fiction of the time, offering a new account of the novel within a cultural moment of acceptance/rejection of lesbian rights.