The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath (Readings Classics)

Esther Greenwood is a young woman from the suburbs of Boston. She is brilliantly beautiful, enormously talented. When a summer internship at a prominent magazine brings her to New York City, her experiences frighten and disorient her. The glamorous culture and the big city lifestyle neither stimulate nor excite her. She is fast falling into the abyss of insanity. Sylvia Plath gauges this plunge so precisely that the reader meets a new Esther on every page. The Bell Jar is Plath s only and semi-autobiographical novel. It was first published in England in 1953 under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" shortly before Plath s suicide. It was published under her own name only posthumously in 1967 and was not published in the USA, her own country, until 1971. Plath was foremost a poet but The Bell Jar is so widely read that much of her fame rests on it. It has been translated into many languages around the world.

About the AuthorSylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Later, she went on a Fulbright scholarship to study at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, England. There she met Ted Hughes at a party in February 1956 and they married in June of the same year. They lived in the United States and later in England and had two children. Plath spent most of her adult life in depression. She made many unsuccessful attempts at her life and finally committed suicide on February 11, 1963. Plath was an exceptionally gifted poet and is frequently dubbed as one of the best woman poets of the western world. She won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems in 1982. She wrote fiction too and her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is one of the most read novels today.