Bell Jar: A Novel : Sylvia Plath
Bell Jar: A Novel : Sylvia Plath
by Sylvia Plath
Publication date:
Couldn't load pickup availability
Share
About the Book
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels
“A coming–of–age masterpiece.” —Boston Globe
"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." —USA Today
Sylvia Plath’s masterwork—an acclaimed novel about a young woman falling into the grip of mental illness and societal pressures.
The Bell Jar is Sylvia’s Plath’s only novel and one of the most renowned works of the twentieth century. “There’s the depression of popular conception— the listless sadness of a character in a pharmaceutical advertisement—and then there’s the biting, brisk, darkly comic version that Plath brings to life in The Bell Jar,” writes The Atlantic, who named it one of the great American novels.
The story chronicles the breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a sharp, ambitious, talented college student coming of age in the 1950s. Esther, a budding writer, wins a coveted summer position at a famous fashion magazine in New York City and is about to embark on what should be one of the most exciting times of her life. Instead, she finds herself caught up in a web of anxieties—the looming expectations of marriage and motherhood, and her own career aspirations. When she returns home to Massachusetts, she slips further beneath the waves of her despair as treatment after treatment proves ineffectual.
Plath’s honest, intimate, and brilliantly rendered exploration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
About the Author
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
Editorial Reviews
"An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding." —Atlantic Monthly
"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." —USA Today
"Esther Greenwood's account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. . . . [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature." —New York Times
"The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures." —Washington Post Book World