The Bell Jar - Large Print by Sylvia Plath (Paperback)

Book 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

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's masterwork--an acclaimed and timeless novel about a young woman falling into the grip of mental illness and societal pressures.

The story chronicles the breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a bright, beautiful, enormously talented college student coming of age in 1950s America, as she navigates the pressures of society along with her own ambitions. While at a prestigious, competitively won position at a New York City magazine one summer, Esther finds herself struggling with the looming expectations of marriage, motherhood, and giving up on her dreams to achieve them. She becomes increasingly disillusioned and her mental health deteriorates, ultimately leading her to undergo harsh treatment and therapy.

"Funny, intense, enormously human" (Cosmopolitan), The Bell Jar is a poignant exploration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche and remains an extraordinary accomplishment from one of the country's most luminous talents.

From the Back Cover

The Bell Jar chronicles the breakdown of the brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful Esther Greenwood, a woman slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's demise with such intensity that the character's insanity becomes completely real, 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.

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

"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

"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