Overview
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.Synopsis
Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Frances McDormand is a fabulous reader, alternating between the narrator's breathy whisper and the other characters' stronger personalities.
Editorials
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.New York Times Book Review
Esther Greenwood's account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing - [this] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature.Billboard Magazine
McDormand gives a sensitive, intimate performance. Herdry, ironic tone, covering up for an undercurrent of fear, perfectly capturesthe character of Esther.People
Frances McDormand's recording....is spellbinding.Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Frances McDormand is a fabulous reader, alternating between the narrator's breathy whisper and the other characters' stronger personalities.New York Times
Esther Greenwood's account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing....[This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature.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
The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath's poetry does catch brilliantly—the moment poised on the edge of chaos.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."Robert Scholes
"A fine novel. As bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those years in hell." --New York Times Book ReviewBook Details
Published
August 1, 2005
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pages
288
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780060837020