By the time the novel was published in 1962, Plath was well on her way to becoming an established poet.
Like Esther, Plath was born and raised in suburban Massachusetts, lost her father at a young age, enjoyed a glittering academic career at Smith College and a glamorous college internship at a women's magazine in New York, and also suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. It certainly helped that the central character, Esther Greenwood, was a thinly veiled version of Plath herself. But The Bell Jar made such a splash because it was such a personal look at one young woman's struggle with suicidal depression. It's true that The Bell Jar was and still is hailed as a major work of feminist fiction, taking on the sexism, materialism, and complacency of American society. The fact that this sentiment comes from the author of The Bell Jar may surprise a lot of people. In other words, personal experience is only interesting if some connection is made to big-picture issues like atomic warfare or the Holocaust.
In a 1962 interview, Sylvia Plath remarked that personal experience was interesting only if it wasn't "a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience." She stressed that personal experience should be made " relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on" ( source).
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