The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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.

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	9780060174903
ISBN 10	0060174900
Title	The Bell Jar
Author	Sylvia Plath
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2013-06-11
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.