Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #607 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 234 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.

Synopsis
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. As her depression deepens she finds herself encased in it, bell-jarred away from the rest of the world. This is the story of her journey back into reality. Highly readable, witty and disturbing, The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel and was originally published under a pseudonym in 1963. What it has to say about what women expect of themselves, and what society expects of women, is as sharply relevant today as it has always been.

Customer Reviews

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.

Suicide as career move
A reviewer below claims, as a 'fact', that "Plath's genius is not being taught in schools". Not only is it a fact that The Bell Jar is on the AQA A2 syllabus, I am teaching it in my school. I am dismayed that someone who can make such elementary errors of fact feels at liberty to disseminate their ill-informed opinions. Not only is Plath a vastly inferior poet to her husband, The Bell Jar is vastly inferior to The Iron Man.