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Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Plath’s only novel, published the year of her death, in 1963, is an autobiographical account that draws on her experience of institutionalization after her first suicide attempt at the age of twenty. Thematically, the novel is obviously quite relevant to “Lady Lazarus.”

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Chopin’s novel from 1890 is a landmark feminist text that famously ends with the suicide of the protagonist, Edna. Edna’s main challenges derive not from mental illness, but from tragic circumstances in her love life. However, Chopin’s portrait of the social limitations placed on female desire resonate strongly with the critique of patriarchy offered by the speaker of “Lady Lazarus.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

It’s worth linking “Lady Lazarus” to Gilman’s short story from 1892, which is another key feminist text. Although “The Yellow Wallpaper” doesn’t deal with suicide, it does examine the disturbing interaction between patriarchy and mental illness in its unnamed narrator.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Plath and Woolf both committed suicide, and their ongoing struggle with mental illness marked their work as well as critical responses to their work. Although Woolf writes about suicide in her more well-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, the suicide in that novel relates to a male war veteran. Therefore, of greater relevance to “Lady Lazarus” is Woolf’s experimental novel of 1931, The Waves, which features a mentally ill woman named Rhoda who ultimately takes her own life.

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