num_pages: 336
description: 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."
language: English
title: The Bell Jar
titlecomplete: The Bell Jar
characters: Joan Gilling, Esther Greenwood, Buddy Willard
genres: Fiction, Poetry, Mental Health, Psychology, Literature, Feminism, Classics, Novels, Mental Illness, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 882418
places: New York (State), The United States of America, New York City, New York, Boston, Massachusetts, Massachusetts
publisher: G K Hall & Co