I have a confession. Until very recently I had never listened to Desert Island Discs. Ok, I realise that's not a proper confession along the lines of 'it was me who stole the crown jewels/slept with your ex/taught the gorillas how to swear in sign language' - but when you're as painfully middle class as I am it would be a fair assumption that I tune in regularly (while knitting my own houmous and reading the Guardian, natch darling). 

But somehow it had never appealed. From what I'd read about it it just seemed like one of those painfully tedious exercises in political PR, along the lines of those 'books politicians are taking on holiday' lists. It gave me visions of Cameron/ Clegg/ one of the Milibands grabbing the nearest intern and and haranguing them abut what music they could choose in order to seem with it and 'like, part of the Zeitgeist but not too ridiculous, Are the Arctic Monkeys still cool?' 

Sylvia Plath's only novel The Bell Jar turns 50 this year and it's still overshadowed by the links – real or inferred – to her own life, and suicide shortly after it was published in the UK.

It's an intense, personal book and so it seems fitting that I vividly remember not only when I first read it, but what I brought to it in terms of expectations and background knowledge.

My GCSE English teacher was obsessed with Ted Hughes, who was Plath's husband at the time of The Bell Jar and her suicide. Hughes was on our syllabus, but she probably managed to spend a lot more classroom time on him and his work than was strictly intended. And she talked a lot about his personal life – his marriage to Plath and the fact that some people (unfairly, in her view) blamed him for her suicide.

In April 1872 a letter was published in The Times entitled ‘Are Women Animals?’ Questioning the status of women in the 19th century, with fewer rights than animals in the law were women even recognised as fully human? Perhaps, the letter suggested, women should take up the status of animals in order to improve their lives.

“Sirs,

Whether women are the equal of men has been endlessly debated. Whether they have souls is a moot point. But can it be too much to ask for a definitive acknowledgement that at least they are animals?”