The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath (Perennial Classics)

Plath, Sylvia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060174900 ISBN 13: 9780060174903

Publisher: Harper, 2021

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."

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.

Review:

"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"