The Bell Jar | A Novel | Sylvia Plath | Hardcover Edition | Place Order

The Bell Jar is Sylvia’s Plath’s only novel and one of the most renowned works of the twentieth cen­tury. “There’s the depression of popular conception— the listless sadness of a character in a pharmaceutical advertisement—and then there’s the biting, brisk, darkly comic version that Plath brings to life in The Bell Jar,” writes The Atlantic, who named it one of the great American novels.

The story chronicles the breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a sharp, ambitious, talented college stu­dent coming of age in the 1950s. Esther, a budding writer, wins a coveted summer position at a famous fashion magazine in New York City and is about to embark on what should be one of the most exciting times of her life. Instead, she finds herself caught up in a web of anxieties—the looming expectations of mar­riage and motherhood, and her own career aspirations. When she returns home to Massachusetts, she slips further beneath the waves of her despair as treatment after treatment proves ineffectual.

Plath’s honest, intimate, and brilliantly rendered exploration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.