Note by Lois Ames / Drawings by Sylvia Plath eVersion 3.0 / Notes at EOFCover:MONTHS IN A YOUNG WOMAN'S LIFE.
"The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath's twentieth year; about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Franny 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
"A special poignance. . . a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- Newsweek
"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. The story, scarcely disguised autobiography, covers six months in a young girl's life, beginning when she goes to New York to serve on a fashion magazine's college-editorial board. It ends when she emerges from a mental hospital after a breakdown." -- Martha Duffy, Time
"Sylvia Plath's only novel is a deceptively modest, uncommonly fine piece of work. . . A sharp and memorable poignancy. With her classical restraint and purity of form, Sylvia Plath is always refusing to break your heart, though in the end, she breaks it anyway." -- Lucy Rosenthal, Saturday Review
"On February 11, 1963, a 30-year-old American poet, separated from her husband and living with her children in a cold London flat, gassed herself and passed into myth.
months later ten of her last poems, written at a speed of two or three a day, 'written,'
said, 'at about four in the morning. . . that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles,' appeared on two pages of Encounter magazine and caused a sensation. In 1965 her husband brought out a posthumous collection, Ariel. . . In the eight years since her death Sylvia Plath has become a major figure in contemporary literature." -- Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Reviewlow-priced Bantam Book
been completely reset in a type face
for easy reading, and was printed
new plates. It contains the complete
of the original hardcover edition.ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.BELL JAR
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