The Bell Jar - (Perennial Classics) by Sylvia Plath (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"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.

From the Back Cover

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's 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 an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Review Quotes

"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. It is a curiously unyielding read: Though the book is semi-autobiographical, Plath's lucid prose belies the mystery she was and remains. . . . The Bell Jar is as frustrating and brilliant as its author." - Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic

"Esther Greenwood's account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. . . . [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature." - New York Times

"The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures." - Washington Post

"The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath's poetry does catch brilliantly--the moment poised on the edge of chaos." - Christian Science Monitor

"Sylvia Plath was a luminous talent. . . one of the most interesting poets in American literature." - New York Review of Books

"Movingly chronicled. . . . It's funny, intense, enormously human." - Cosmopolitan

"The Bell Jar is regarded as a coming-of-age masterpiece . . . . Sylvia Plath has become of the influential writers of her time." - 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