I
was supposed to be having the time of my life.
Esther Greenwood is at college and is fighting two battles, one
against her own desire for perfection in all things - grades,
boyfriend, looks, career - and the other against remorseless mental
illness.
When
she wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953,
she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to
become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles
of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control.
She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a
suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships
and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published
in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is partially
based on Plath's own life and has become a modern classic. Renowned
for its intensity and outstandingly vivid prose, it broke existing
boundaries between fiction and reality and helped to make Plath
an enduring feminist icon. It was published under a pseudonym
a few weeks before the author's suicide. The Bell Jar has been
celebrated for its darkly funny and a razor sharp portrait of
1950s society and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
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 scholarship, 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.
'It
is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems.
The world in which the events of the novel take place is a world
bounded by the Cold War on one side and the sexual war on the
other… This novel is not political nor historical in any narrow
sense, but in looking at the madness of the world and the world
of madness it forces us to consider the great question posed by
all truly realistic fiction: What is reality and how can it be
confronted? Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell
jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing.'
New
York Times Book Review
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