The Bell Jar
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4.5 • 62 Ratings
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
Esther Greenwood begins the summer with an internship at a popular women’s magazine, but her hopes for a career as a writer are dashed when she returns home to Massachusetts to discover she’s been rejected from a prestigious writing seminar. Listless and suffering from the onset of depression, Esther attempts suicide, and eventually finds herself in a variety of hospitals undergoing controversial electro-shock therapy.
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APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Bell Jar, the only novel by poet Sylvia Plath, is both an essential feminist text and a harrowing account of mental illness. What nobody ever seems to mention is that it’s also brilliantly readable—and often darkly funny. Despite landing a prestigious magazine internship in New York, young Esther Greenwood feels suffocated by the limits placed on women in the 1950s and by her own encroaching depression, which causes her to unravel over the course of a summer. (Sadly, Esther’s story mirrors Plath’s own struggles; she took her life shortly after the book’s publication in 1963.) Simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and vividly realistic, Plath’s writing makes us feel both claustrophobic and energized. Mostly, we wish she’d had the chance to write a follow-up.
