Beatrice Hitchman situates The Bell Jar within an intriguing cultural moment for gay and lesbian fiction in the United States. She provides an original and fascinating account of the novel within the context of the boom in lesbian pulp fiction of the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular psychological writings, and the lesbian bar culture in West Village during the period, all of which helped to place images of lesbians in a wider circulation. Hitchman reads Joan Gilling as a lesbian character, considering The Bell Jar in the context of lesbian fiction of the time, offering a new account of the novel within a cultural moment of acceptance/rejection of lesbian rights.