ALL HANDS TO THE PUMP

THE BELL JAR

by Sylvia Plath

From the Publisher

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.

Time

“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.”

Newsweek

“A special poignance…a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will.”

New York Times Book Review

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.

Robert Scholes

“A fine novel. As bitter and remorseless as her last poems — the kind of book Salinger’s Fanny have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those years in hell.” —New York Times Book Review