![]() It is because she knew that she was ‘Lady Lazarus.’ Her works do not only come to us posthumously. This is not so much because Sylvia Plath, in taking her own life, gave her readers a certain ghoulish interest they could not bring to most poems and novels, though this is no doubt partly true. But the authority of failure is but a pale shadow of the authority of suicide, as we feel it in Ariel and in The Bell Jar. It was a source of power in his later work. Scott Fitzgerald used to claim that he wrote with ‘the authority of failure,’ and he did. It is very much a story of the fifties, but written in the early sixties, and now, after being effectively suppressed in this country for eight years, published in the seventies.į. ![]() It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems- the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell. “ The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath’s 20th year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. ![]() ![]() The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. ![]()
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