look what they've done!

Sylvia Plath in 1957
 

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, had a profound influence on me when I read it in my teens. At that time I had never heard of Sylvia Plath, and I read the book because a classmate had chosen it for a book report and it sounded interesting. I'm glad, as this blogger, Fatema Ahmed, is too, that I read it without knowing anything about Plath or her work. There is so much baggage around that whole story now, her husband, her suicide, that it is almost impossible to come to her work fresh - unless you have never heard of her or of Ted Hughes. I read the book again some years later and thought parts of it were very funny, which I had not thought the first time. I still have my paperback copy from that time - I quite often pass books on, but not this one - and its cover is the one on the left. Fab, I think you will agree. I was utterly horrified when I saw the cover on the right, which has been produced for the 50th anniversary

edition. Lipstick and a powder compact? What were they thinking? Twitter and other places have gone ballistic. But then I thought again. Not only is there a whole new generation, or two, of girls and women who do not know who Plath was (I don't think men ever read her - am I wrong?), but maybe the cover designer had a point. Whatever else Plath was, she was a woman of the 1950s. Lipstick and powder compacts would have been important to her. Maybe to buy the book with the cover on the left you needed to know already approximately what book you were choosing, and the cover on the right allows you to choose this book if you are just browsing, thereby increasing its sales. Nothing wrong with that. And in these days of Kindle and other e-readers (which is how I do almost all my reading these days) does the cover design matter? I submit that yes, it still does, but nowhere near as much as it did when books only existed on paper.  So I'm not joining the twitterstorm of outrage about this.

When I first read The Bell Jar I did not know anything about depression either. I'm glad to say I still don't, not really, in terms of personal experience, though I have lived with someone who suffers from it and have thus seen it at close hand from the outside. This book should be required reading for anyone who has encountered depression in any way, and that means most people.

I hope a great many people discover Sylvia Plath and her work this year, half a century after her suicide. Even the manner of it (gas oven) is ancient history now.