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.


From Library Journal
This 25th-anniversary edition of Plath's posthumous autobiographical novel includes a new foreword by the book's original editor, Frances McCullough; biographical notes; and eight previously unpublished drawings by Plath. Bravo to HarperCollins for putting all this together at a reasonable price.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


--Atlantic Monthly
"An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding."


From AudioFile
The title of this iconic novel by the poet Sylvia Plath, who ultimately died a suicide, refers to the claustrophic depression that overcomes her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, one summer during her college years. Maggie Gyllenhaal must create the voice of a young woman who feels utterly cut off from the colors and warmth of the world, imprisoned under a glass dome, but somehow connect with the reader while doing it. She pulls it off beautifully, giving Esther a sympathetic quality that the reader can feel, even when Esther cannot. Plath thought of this book as a potboiler, but it is better than that, full of acute observation and sorry truth, especially in this fine version. B.G. 2004 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith
Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel is a somber, circling journey through a severe depression. Nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, on a one-month internship with a fashion magazine in New York City in the early 1950s, wonders what life is all about and feels increasingly confused by her thoughts. When she returns to her mother's home, Esther's feelings of despair become apparent. The reader is awake with Esther when she hasn't slept for seven days, fourteen days, twenty-one days, and feels her suffering when she refuses to wash her clothes or hair because "it seem[s] so silly." At her mother's insistence, Esther sees a doctor who asks her what she thinks is wrong. Contemplating her response, she realizes the question "made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong." She is given shock treatment - "a great jolt [that] drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant" - which causes her to wonder what she had done to deserve this. Later, she spends extended time in private sanitariums. Her awareness throughout her ordeal that many of the accepted realities of life are not her realities makes her struggle even more heart-wrenching. Her pain is real and tangible and it is with sadness the reader learns that Sylvia Plath committed suicide only one month after The Bell Jar's publication. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

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."

Atlantic Monthly

"An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding."

Book World

The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures.

Christian Science Monitor