The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

"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

"As clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing."--New York Times

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, a poignant exploration of a young woman's struggle to navigate modern life and womanhood in mid-century America, is her seminal work and an enduring classic that has proven to be just as relevant today as it was when originally published in 1963.

Esther Greenwood--brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented--is about to embark on what should be the most exciting season of her life: a summer spent in New York City, interning for a magazine.

But even though the life that is unfurling before her is everything she wants, she feels apart from it, unable to live in her life the way the other girls staying at the women's hotel seem able to do.

And the further apart she feels from the noise and color of life around her, especially after she returns home to Massachusetts, the more she begins to collapse in on herself, slowly slipping farther and farther beneath the waves of her despair as treatment after treatment proves ineffectual.

Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's mind with such intensity that her breakdown feels visceral and real, one that makes the early days of her recovery feel even more fragile. Plath's exploration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an instructor at Smith College, and had two children. Later, they moved back to England, where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote The Bell Jar, which was first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. The Bell Jar was first published under her own name in the United States by Harper & Row in 1971, despite the protests of Plath's family. Plath's Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780060930189
ISBN 10	0060930187
Title	The Bell Jar
Author	Sylvia Plath
Series	Perennial Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2000-02-02
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.