The Bell Jar

Esther Greenwood is a young woman from the suburbs of Boston. She is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented. When a summer internship at a prominent magazine brings her to New York City, her experiences frighten and disorient her. The glamorous culture and the big city lifestyle neither stimulate nor excite her. She is fast falling into the abyss of insanity. Sylvia Plath gauges this plunge so precisely that the reader meets a new Esther on every page.

The Bell Jar is Plath s only and a semi-autobiographical novel. It was first published in England in 1953 under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" shortly before Plath s suicide. It was published under her own name only posthumously in 1967 and was not published in the USA, her own country, until 1971. Plath was foremost a poet but The Bell Jar is so widely read that much of her fame rests on it. It has been translated into many languages around the world.