When I first saw the jolly book cover of the book ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath in a bookshop, it drew my interest and I thought I shall read it sometime. A few months later, I saw the same book with a different cover where it writes ‘5oth Anniversary Edition’ and I immediately bought it. (Photos: The jolly book cover of ‘The Bell Jar’ (amazon.com) / The cover of the other book I will mention in this post (anylang.net))

I had mentioned about the 1920s in US, referred as the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in my older post titled “Great Gatsby – A Fitzgerald Classic”: The period after the end of World War I of luxurious automobiles, extreme lifestyles, big parties, and trendy live jazz venues or the ‘Jazz Age’, a Fitzgerald term, which he had said “the age of miracles, art, excess and satire”. After the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, and the 1940s, defined by World War II, the 1950s was another post-war period in the United States, marked by major social and political changes – the period in which the book “The Bell Jar” is set.

‘The Bell Jar’ covers: Harper Perennial 2005 edition & Faber (UK) 50th Anniversary edition, 2013 (Photos: lithub.com)

The book starts with the Rosenbergs case: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in the United States for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to Russia in the summer of 1953 (theguardian.com). The case and everything in the book is narrated by Ester Greenwood, a graduate of a college in Boston with a scholarship, who wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, having won the magazine contest along with eleven other girls by writing stories and poems.

Ester and the other girls stay in a hotel in New York. Working in a New York fashion magazine in the middle of Manhattan is a means for Ester to meet successful people and to realize her dream to become a writer, who finds herself drifting from fashion shows to cocktail parties and many different events. As she struggles to deal with difficult relationships and a society which undervalues women and women’s aspirations, she gets into a depression leading to a mental illness and several suicide attempts.

America in the 1950s – A 50s Diner, Malt Shop and a Drive In Theater / A 1950s style town (Illustrations: deviantart.com)

Ester Greenwood has a mature and unconventional character, rather intellectual, and has an incredible ability to observe and describe people. The following lines from the book regarding her views about the girls she stays with in a New York hotel gives some idea:
“The girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sun-roof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans… I talked with one of them, and she was bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil. Girls like that make me sick. … Nineteen years, and I hadn’t been out of New England except for this trip to New York…” (‘The Bell Jar‘ by Sylvia Plath)

New England & New York City maps (wikivoyage.org / Pinterest)

It was interesting for me to learn that The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s only novel, who is rather known for her poems – the only novel with such a success that it had become a modern classic that I could buy a 50th century edition. The Bell Jar was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, a few weeks before Plath’s suicide… (The introductory paragraph on the first page of ‘The Bell Jar,’ 50th anniversary edition)

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932 and graduated from Smith Collage in 1955. She attended to Cambridge University on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes, one of the great English poets and writers of his time. The romantic marriage of the two leading poets ended in tragedy as Hughes left Plath for another woman in 1962, and Plath committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 30, following a depression. She had gassed herself in her London flat in in Fitzroy Road, Camden Town while her children, one-year-old Nicholas (late biologist) and two-year-old Frieda (artist and writer), slept. (independent.co.uk, The Bell Jar, 50th anniversary edition)

Sylvia Plath with her husband Ted Hughes in England, 1956 (the year they got married) (Archivio GBB/Contrasto/Redux via time.com) / Ted Hughes at the National Theatre, London, in 1986 (Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstock via independent.co.uk)

Sylvia Plath typing in the backyard, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1954 / Hughes and Plath in Massachusetts, 1959 (Photos: Archivio GBB/Contrasto/Redux & Everett/Shutterstock, both via time.com)
(After Plath graduated from Cambridge, the couple moved to Massachusetts, USA – where Plath was an English instructor at Smith College while Hughes taught English literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst campus before they moved to Boston, another town in Massachusetts, to write for a year. (libguides.smith.edu))

Plath & Hughes’ house in Beacon Hill, Boston (9 Willow Street), where they moved to in 1958, two years after their marriage, with the intention of spending all their free time writing (bostonmagazine.com) (Photo: lithium.com) / The house of the couple in Devon in the English countryside where they lived after they returned to UK from America in the early 1960s and where Hughes lived until he died. (exeter.ac.uk) (Photo: Pinterest)

Sylvia Plath standing beside her bicycle, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1951 / Sylvia Plath with typewriter in Yorkshire, September 1956 (Photos: Archives of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts via theguardian.com)

Ted Hughes’ letter, he had written to Plath’s mother a month after Plath’s suicide, tells about Sylvia Plath through his eyes:
“I don’t want ever to be forgiven. I don’t mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet.” (Ted Hughes’ letter to Plath’s mother in 1963, independent.co.uk)

Sylvia Plath on a Paris street, near Notre Dame, March 1956 (Photo: shoemaking.net)

The Bell Jar novel, which has become modern classic for its funny and sharp portrait of 1950s society, is partially based on Plath’s own life (The Bell Jar, 50th anniversary edition). Although the novel has a depressing tone from time to time, like Ester’s suicide attempts, mental hospital days or detailed medical scenes mentioned, Plath’s writing is so powerful that you can’t help continuing to read… There are also pleasant, interesting and quite funny parts in the novel, told by Plath’s observant and teasy tone. Ester Greenwood’s standing as a wise independent woman against a society that underestimates women, and her sarcastic criticisms as well as her searches for meaning and identity against the pressures of that society startles and mesmerizes…

Besides her sharp character, Ester has a wise sense of humor which makes you smile, even when she mentions unpleasant occasions. I think the ‘bell jar‘ is her protection and isolation, from the society whose pressures she feels overwhelmed by and whose showy extremes she doesn’t belong to. An isolation and protection which in the end leads to her mental illness…

Plath also describes the mode in the 1950s in US quite vividly. My jolly note from the book is the sumptuous cocktail parties, which I found quite ambitious and extraordinary for the 1950s, that would compete with even today’s standards. Like the following (a part from the book):

“Arrayed on the Ladies’ Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar…” (from ‘The Bell Jar’, by Sylvia Plath)

Avocado halves stuffed with crabmeat (Photo: lifesourcenaturalfoods.com) / Black caviar (Photo: 123rf.com)

Below is another part from the novel, a funny tone of Plath:
“… my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, “I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.“(from ‘The Bell Jar’, by Sylvia Plath)

Before moving to the second book I will mention in this post, I will finally mention a quote by Sylvia Plath – the quote combining the two books as I stated in the title. The quote below:

Photo: azquotes.com

A wonderful quote I think, which I do sympathize with, as I feel that there are so much to see, to read, to watch, to learn, to experience, to do, or one would like to do in life, and life flows fast – leaving you with piles of books to read, tens of films to watch, many dream destinations to visit and many beauties or different ways of life not yet discovered…

And how is the quote connected with the second book I will mention, which is “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig?: When I opened the book ‘The Midnight Library’, which I had bought recently, I came across the above quote of Sylvia Plath, whose novel ‘The Bell Jar’ I had already started reading! I then decided that it was meant for me to read both of the books.

Photos: Pinterest (A cover of ‘The Midnight Library’, a fantasy novel by Matt Haig, published in 2020 / The quote of Plath that appears on the first pages of the book)

‘The Midnight Library‘, The Sunday Times and The New York Times bestseller, is an amazing book. It is about fate, regrets, choices, coincidences, surprises, and different lives… We may all feel depressed or lost sometime in our lives. I think this book can be a silver lining in those times as well as a source of inspiration and joy in one’s journey in life.

Nora Seed, a 35 year-old young woman works in a local music store in Bedford, England. Being once into music, she used to write songs and perform at the rock band ‘The Labyrinths‘, consisting of her brother Joe, Joe’s best friend Ravi and his girlfriend, until she quit. She was also a good swimmer, which she quit after her mother’s early death.

Nora learns that her cat Volt is dead in the street. The next day she gets fired from her job. Thinking about her ex-fiancee Dan, she runs into Ravi and learns that her brother Joe was in town yet had not called her. She goes through her social media, with no comments, and sees everyone is better off. She texts her former best friend Izzy living in Australia, who reads it yet does not reply.

Bedford, England – a market town in Bedfordshire, close to London (Photo: experiencebedfordshire.co.uk)

Feeling with no purpose and no reason to exist, Nora decides to die and commits suicide, after which she finds herself transported to a bizarre place at the stroke of midnight – where aisles of shelves reach up to the ceiling with endless amount of books with no titles or author names on them: The Midnight Library. The librarian is Mrs Elm – the librarian of her small school library in Bedford. She remembers the rainy afternoons playing chess with her and the moments Mrs Elm consoled her when she learned at the age of 16 that her father had died of a sudden heart attack. As she tries to figure out what is going on, Mrs Elm explains:

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices…“She further tells:
“There are lives where you make different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes… And they all exist in the Midnight Library.“

Photos: (instaread.co / lensofjen.org)

There was also The Book of Regrets in the Midnight Library, where every regret Nora has ever had was recorded – all the things Nora wished she had done differently. Nora had many regrets. One was not marrying Dan, her ex-fiancee she broke up two days before the wedding. She remembered their dream of owning a quaint little pub in the country. Was there a life they were together? Mrs. Elm handed a book to her. Nora started to read:
“She walked out of the pub, into the cool night air…“. After a short while, she was not reading the book but standing in a pretty village road in Oxfordshire in front of an elegantly painted pub sign “THE THREE HORSESHOES” – the pub she was running with her husband Dan …

By chance: A quaint pub in Oxfordshire named ‘Three Horseshoes’ (Photo: dailyinfo.co.uk)

Amazing isn’t it? Have you ever thought of how your life would be if you have taken a different path at some point? Do you have any regrets or ‘if only’s? Which regret or choice would you undo if you were given the chance?

Nora tried many lives. She became owner of a country pub with Dan, a rock star in a famous band (The Labyrinths) singing on stage in São Paulo, a glaciologist in Longyearbyen, an olympic swimmer, a whale watcher in Sydney, a vineyard owner in California and more… In one life her dad was alive, in another her brother Joe had died …

Longyearbyen – Norway’s and the world’s most northern town in its Svalbard archipelago with beautiful Arctic landscapes and wildlife (Photo: Getty Images via forbes.com)

The book also mentions quantum physics and its many-worlds interpretation, concepts I also consider and wonder about:
“There are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes and one enters a new universe with every decision he or she makes, and that every alternative possibility happens simultaneously… “. Hugo, a man Nora met when she visited the life she was a glaciologist in Longyearbyen, explains her:

“I am here but I also know I am not here. I am also lying in a hospital in Paris, having an aneurysm. And I am also skydiving in Arizona. And travelling around southern India. And tasting wine in Lyon, and lying on a yacht off the Côte d’Azur.” (‘The Midnight Library‘ by Matt Haig)

Two jolly discoveries from the book: Toby jugs, 19th century English pottery & Brazilian Honey Cakes (Pão de Mel), popular Brazilian dessert, that Nora mentions as very delicious (Photos: potomackcompany.com / brigadeirobakery.com)

Haig compares the moves in chess to infinite possibilities in life… Mrs Elm tells Nora every move opens a new world of possibility. She further tells that a pawn is never just a pawn.”Never underestimate the big importance of small things.” she says.

A scene from ‘The Queen’s Gambit‘, one of Netflix’s most watched miniseries about the life Beth Harmon, a fictional chess prodigy. (We did enjoy watching it with my son, who is a good chess player.) (Photo: Phil Bray/Netflix via vulture.com)

Matt Haig is an English author and journalist. His memoir ‘Reasons to Stay Alive‘ stayed in the British top ten for about two years. His children’s book ‘A Boy Called Christmas‘ became a classic, translated in over 40 languages. Several of his books were made into films. He lives in Brighton, a seaside resort in East Sussex close to London, with his wife Andrea Semple, also a writer, and their two children. (matthaig.com)

Matt Haig (Getty Images by via standard.co.uk), 2021 / Matt Haig at his home in central Brighton, East Sussex, (Photo: James Clarke via thetimes.com), 2018

Haig had suffered from depression at some point in his live and walked to the edge of a cliff planning to kill himself and luckily stopped. The incident was in 1999 while he was living on the island of Ibiza, where he worked in a nightclub. Years later, he told about his struggles and coping with depression in his bestselling memoir ‘Reasons to Stay Alive‘ published in 2015, after which he became a mental health mentor. After running his own internet marketing company, he became a full-time writer. (irishtimes.com, theguardian.com)

Matt Haig and Andrea Semple wed in Las Vegas in 2007 (dailymail.co.uk) / Matt Haig, at home in York with his daughter Pearl, 2014 (telegraph.co.uk) (After Ibiza, the couple had lived in Leeds and York before moving to Brighton where they currently live)

When I read somewhere that Haig lived in a boat in London, I wondered about it and found out in an interview that they occasionally stay at Sea Containers on the South Bank, since one can just roll out and walk by the river. He says he likes to walk and tries to arrive an hour early to his meetings in London to walk from Victoria and through Green Park.

Sea Containers, South Bank, London (standard.co.uk)

Haig had studied English and history at the University of Hull in Yorkshire and did a master’s in English literature at University of Leeds, both in Yorkshire. (literature.britiscouncil.org). I came across an interview on the net about Haig’s favorite things about Yorkshire which immediately caught me for Yorkshire is a place on my list for its marvelous images I stumble upon and fall into in social media from time to time.

The river in York and Whitby Abbey (one of the most spectacular sites in England) in Whitby – among Haig’s favorite places in Yorkshire. Running by the river had been one of his favorite things when he lived in York. (Photos: Getty Images (left) and daverhead (right) both via greatbritishlife.co.uk)

Haig says of Yorkshire:
“It’s like a microcosm of England in terms of the culture and restaurants and pubs. I love Yorkshire and the people.”
(Matt Haig, greatbritishlife.co.uk)

“Star Inn at Harome” in Harome, Yorkshire (Photo: telegraph.co.uk)

Matt Haig thinks Yorkshire has the best pubs in the world. “The Star Inn at Harome” is one of his favorites. He also enjoys  “The Star Inn The City” in York, owned by the same people.

Bar and dining room in ‘The Star Inn at Harome’ – a Michelin-starred inn with rooms (Photos:thestaratharome.co.uk) – (A typical English country pub, both outside and inside. I do like such cosy and inspiring English pubs.)

A main coarse and a tempting dessert served at the pub. (Photos: telegraph.co.uk). Haig mentions ‘The Star Inn at Harome’ as a great pub with lovely food and atmosphere.

“The Star Inn The City” in York – also suggested by Haig (Photo: thestarinthecity.co.uk)

Coming back to our book, which has been a means to me to discover many nice things… “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig is a captivating book. It is like a celebration of life… Mrs. Elm says to Nora:

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it. … It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” (‘The Midnight Library’ by Matt Haig)

Sylvia Plath (Photo: nytimes.com) / Matt Haig (Photo: Sarah Lee, theguardian.com)

It is as if Matt Haig sort of responds to Sylvia’s Plath’s words, which I quoted above, in The Midnight Library as follows:

“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. … We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays…” (Matt Haig, ‘The Midnight Library’)

Good Reads!