The Bell Jar: A Novel (Perennial Classics) - Hardcover

Plath, Sylvia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060174900 ISBN 13: 9780060174903

Publisher: Harper, 1996

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

From the Back Cover

A Special Hardcover Edition to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of Sylvia Plath's Remarkable Novel

Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

From the Inside Flap

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother and the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Frances McCullough, who was the Harper & Row editor for the original edition, about the untold story of The Bell Jar's first American publication.

Reviews

This 25th-anniversary edition of Plath's posthumous autobiographical novel includes a new foreword by the book's original editor, Frances McCullough; biographical notes; and eight previously unpublished drawings by Plath. Bravo to HarperCollins for putting all this together at a reasonable price.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060174900
• ISBN 13: 9780060174903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320