A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York
fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An
autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and
suicide attempt, "The Bell Jar" is more than a confessional novel, it is
a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations
in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that
expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning
young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent
toward madness.
"A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind
of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years
later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes,
"The New York Times Book Review."
"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." -- "Time."
"A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it
shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- "Newsweek."