The Bell Jar

Product Description

"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."

-The New York Times "McDormand gives a sensitive, intimate performance. Herdry, ironic tone, covering up for an undercurrent of fear, perfectly capturesthe character of Esther."-Billboard Magazine The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup 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.

Amazon.com 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 AudioFile

The only novel by troubled American poet Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar tells of a young woman's descent into madness and her emergence back to reality. It is frank, witty, earthy, scatological, yet remarkably poetic. Also autobiographical. The author ended her own life a month after the book's publication. Perhaps a bit angrier and certainly more mature than the first-person narrator, Frances McDormand, nonetheless, gives a fine, intermittently inspired reading--sensitive to both the author's language and the protagonist's inner life. However, the sound quality leaves much to be desired, and numerous technical glitches mar an otherwise superb performance. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About the Author

Sylvia Plath (1932-63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright fellowship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other posthumous publications include Ariel, her landmark publication, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962.

From the Inside Flap

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 b