The Bell Jar - Softcover

Plath, Sylvia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571268862 ISBN 13: 9780571268863

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2013

Synopsis

Now in its 50th anniversary edition, Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into mental illness. The Bell Jar broke the boundaries between fiction and reality and helped cement Sylvia Plath's place as an enduring feminist icon. Celebrated for its darkly humorous, razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, it continues to resonate with readers today as testament to the universal human struggle to claim one's rightful place in the world.

The year is 1953. Recent graduate Esther Greenwood leaves Boston for New York City when she wins a coveted summer internship at a prestigious fashion magazine. A talented aspiring writer, Esther's initial elation erodes as the clamour and glamour of big city life jars the sensitive introvert. Somewhere between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control.

Back in Massachusetts she spirals into depression as she grapples with an identity crisis brought on by the pressures and expectations of the rigid gender roles of the 1950's. Esther struggles with difficult personal relationships: a disappointing fiancé, the loss of her father and a mother who fails to grasp the depths of her despair. Esther ultimately finds herself in a mental asylum, where she is unsuccessfully "cured" with traumatic electroshock therapy.

Esther shares her desperate and harrowing attempt to escape her crippling depression. Readers of Plath's poetry will recognize her voice as Esther documents the feelings of sadness, lethargy, boredom, hopelessness and isolation that accompany a major depressive disorder in a time when mental health challenges were poorly understood, stigmatized, and often barbarically treated.

Originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas just a few weeks before the author's suicide, The Bell Jar has sold millions of copies worldwide and has become a modern classic. Its stark portrayal of mental illness and women's treatment in society set the stage for later books such as Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation and Susanna Kaysen's Girl Interrupted.

'It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems . . . The world in which the events of the novel take place is a world bounded by the Cold War on one side and the sexual war on the other . . . In looking at the madness of the world and the world of madness it forces us to consider the great question posed by all truly realistic fiction: What is reality and how can it be confronted? . . . Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing.' (New York Times Book Review)

About this title

Review:

Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.

From the Publisher:

A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.

"A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes, The New York Times Book Review.

"By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon." -- Time.

"A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- Newsweek.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0571268862
• ISBN 13: 9780571268863
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 234