Product Description

A student from Boston wins a guest editorship on a national magazine, and finds a new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so the choice of future is overwhelming. She is faced with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5612 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 258 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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.

Review
With the recent UK publication of Plath's diaries, what better time to re-acquaint ourselves with her fiction? Plath's genius, of course, was as a poet but her only novel deserves more serious attention. It is a fictionalized account of her first suicide attempt and her subsequent hospitalization and shock therapy. What marks it out is the cool objectivity of Plath's tone. She never lapses into self-pity, nor does her wit ever fail her. It's a deceptively simple read, yet the book is a savage indictment of the 1950s in America. (Kirkus UK)

It is difficult to read Sylvia Plath's novel (which appeared in England under a pseudonym in the year of her death, 1963) with any degree of objectivity since it deals with her earlier breakdown and suicide attempt. The telltale lesions are everywhere and in the hindsight of what has happened, the experience of the bell jar ("To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream") becomes even more fateful. Certainly any marginal illusion of fiction is nullified. When first met Esther is a naive nineteen-year-old who reads and writes poetry, who remembers with some irritation the first boy she really dated at college, and who comes to New York for a few weeks in the summer of her junior year having won one of those magazine apprenticeship awards. Esther broods over the Rosenbergs' electrocution (some of Miss Plath's parallels are too obvious to even be justified as symbols); she overeats; she becomes immobilized in indecision and returns home to lie in bed and never sleep. After one or two visits with a non-verbal psychiatrist who gives her shock treatment, she attempts suicide and the rest of the account deals with her institutionalization and ?? An occasional line ("A heavy naughtiness pricked through my veins") offends, but there's some remarkable writing with a straightforward and irreducible simplicity: "The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence." There is no mistaking or evading the airless suspension of life within the bell jar. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
A student from Boston wins a guest editorship on a national magazine, and finds a new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so the choice of future is overwhelming. She is faced with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity.

Customer Reviews

degradation into depression
Sadly this author knew what she was talking about, and sadly I can relate to the protagonist. She describes the thought process perfectly and at one point I didn't even notice the change. It's a wonderfully written book, I just love it. I don't know what to say about it other than I really liked it, it's the only thing of hers I have read and because of this I just might try to read some of her poems, even though I'm not a poem kind of person.

On another note if you know of anyone who is depressed it might be a good idea to read this book to understand the way they are thinking. It could help and even if it doesn't it still a good read.

The view from inside a breakdown
I read this on the recommendation of my daughter who related to the semi autobiographical protagonist even 35 years later.
Although medical treatments have changed since the book was written, the frequency of such cases must surely have risen and this is as relevant a book as ever.

Esther Greenwood reperesents Sylvia Plath in the book; an intelligent, active woman who suddenly begins to find that life has lost its meaning and importance. From being constantly busy, she becomes totally demotivated, giving up further study in favour of lounging around her mother's house. After she attempts to kill herself with an overdose, her mother enlists medical help and Esther is eventually admitted to an asylum for treatment. This includes electric shock treatment and constant medication.
The treatment seems to have been sucessful to a degree as Ms Plath went on to write this book and numerous works of poetry. Unfortunately her eventual suicide, aged 31, suggests that all was not as it should have been and the ghosts were still lurking.

It put me in mind of Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen who also wrote of her time in a psychiatric ward in 1967. I was amazed to find, on further investigation, that she was in the same hospital as Sylvia Plath.

Recommended - a unique opportunity to understand the emotions and confusion of a breakdown.

Plath was a genius
The Bell Jar is definitely Plath speaking from her own experiences, in 1950s America and the tigma of mental illness that she experienced and how her family and friends coped.
It charts the journey of her bi polar illness and is very heavy in places but a worthwhile reading in understanding her poetry and other works.