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The Bell Jar (Paperback)

Format:	Paperback 234 pages

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RRP £7.99

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The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's 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 an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

Book details

Published
05/02/1976

Publisher
Faber and Faber

ISBN
9780571081783

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UK Kirkus 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)