The Bell Jar.

PLATH, Sylvia [Victoria Lucas].

Item Number: 141723

London: Heinemann, 1963.

First edition of the author’s classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a very good dust jacket, small names to the front free endpaper. Jacket design by Thomas Simmonds. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable.

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic. "In looking at the madness of the world and the world of madness [this book] forces us to consider the great question posed by all truly realistic fiction: what is reality and how can it be confronted"(New York Times Book Review).