The Bell Jar

"An enchanting book. The author wears her scholarship with grace, and the amazing story she has to tell is recounted with humor and understanding." -- --Atlantic MonthlyNovel by Sylvia Plath, first published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and later published under her real name. Plath committed suicide one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, her only novel. This thinly veiled autobiography details the life of Esther Greenwood, a college woman who struggles through a mental breakdown in the 1950s. Plath examines coming of age in a hypocritical world in this painfully introspective novel, which is noted for its symbolic use of bottles and jars and black and white colors and its symbols of imprisonment and death. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of LiteratureSylvia 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 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith--This text refers to the Hardcoveredition.