Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-36% $12.79$12.79
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$7.13$7.13
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: -OnTimeBooks-
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
The Bell Jar Paperback – Deckle Edge, June 11, 2013
Purchase options and add-ons
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels
A beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of this haunting American classic: a realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.
“It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath’s voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal.” — USA Today
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 neurosis 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 an enduring classic.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial Modern Classics
- Publication dateJune 11, 2013
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.72 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100061148512
- ISBN-13978-0061148514
- Lexile measure1050L
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Review
“It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath’s voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal and make it as meaningful . . . as it was 25 years ago.” — USA Today
“Esther Greenwood’s account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. . . . [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature.” — New York Times
“The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor’s office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures.” — Washington Post Book World
“The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath’s poetry does catch brilliantly—the moment poised on the edge of chaos.” — Christian Science Monitor
“As clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing.” — New York Times
From the Back Cover
A Special Paperback Edition to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of Sylvia Plath's Remarkable Novel
Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity
Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
About the Author
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Bell Jar
By Sylvia PlathHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Sylvia PlathAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0061148512
Chapter One
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers—goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn't get them out of my mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the cadaver's head—or what there was left of it—floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver's head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
(I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.)
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I'd bought in Bloomingdale's one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocketbook to match. And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were working on—drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lame bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion—everybody would think I must be having a real whirl.
Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.
Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)
There were twelve of us at the hotel.
We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with our particular complexions.
I still have the makeup kit they gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of brown mascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blue eye-shadow just big enough to dab the tip of your finger in, and three lipsticks ranging from red to pink, all cased in the same little gilt box with a mirror on one side. I also have a white plastic sunglasses case with colored shells and sequins and a green plastic starfish sewed onto it.
I realized we kept piling up these presents because it was as good as free advertising for the firms involved, but I couldn't be cynical. I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later, when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.
So there were twelve of us at the hotel, in the same wing on the same floor in single rooms, one after the other, and it reminded me of my dormitory at college. It wasn't a proper hotel—I mean a hotel where there are both men and women mixed about here and there on the same floor.
This hotel—the Amazon—was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn't get at them and deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.
These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil.
Girls like that make me sick. I'm so jealous I can't speak. Nineteen years, and I hadn't been out of New England except for this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
I guess one of my troubles was Doreen.
I'd never known a girl like Doreen before. Doreen came from a society girls' college down South and had bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished and just about indestructible, and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don't mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.
Doreen singled me out right away. She made me feel I was that much sharper than the others, and she really was wonderfully funny. She used to sit next to me at the conference table, and when the visiting celebrities were talking she'd whisper witty sarcastic remarks to me under her breath.
Her college was so fashion conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocketbook covers made out of the same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had a matching pocketbook. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.
The only thing Doreen ever bawled me out about was bothering to get my assignments in by a deadline.
"What are you sweating over that for?" Doreen lounged on my bed in a peach silk dressing gown, filing her long, nicotine-yellow nails with an emery board, while I typed up the draft of an interview with a best-selling novelist.
That was another thing—the rest of us had starched cotton summer nighties and quilted housecoats, or maybe terry-cloth robes that doubled as beachcoats, but Doreen wore these full-length nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing gowns the color of skin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity. She had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them.
"You know old Jay Cee won't give a damn if that story's in tomorrow or Monday." Doreen lit a cigarette and let the smoke flare slowly from her nostrils so her eyes were veiled. "Jay Cee's ugly as sin," Doreen went on coolly. "I bet that old husband of hers turns out all the lights before he gets near her or he'd puke otherwise."
Jay Cee was my boss, and I liked her a lot, in spite of what Doreen said. She wasn't one of the fashion magazine gushers with fake eyelashes and giddy jewelry. Jay Cee had brains, so her plug-ugly looks didn't seem to matter. She read a couple of languages and knew all the quality writers in the business.
I tried to imagine Jay Cee out of her strict office suit and luncheon-duty hat and in bed with her fat husband, but I just couldn't do it. I always had a terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together.
Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn't think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid on my typewriter and clicked it shut.
Doreen grinned. "Smart girl."
Somebody tapped at the door.
"Who is it?" I didn't bother to get up.
Continues...
Excerpted from Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath Copyright © 2006 by Sylvia Plath. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial Modern Classics (June 11, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061148512
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061148514
- Lexile measure : 1050L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.72 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #127,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,500 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #4,244 in Contemporary Women Fiction
- #7,789 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and The Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Plath is credited with being a pioneer of the 20th-century style of writing called confessional poetry. Her poem "Daddy" is one of the best-known examples of this genre.
In 1963, Plath's semi-autobiographic novel The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"; it was reissued in 1966 under her own name. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
She’s honest with her world and self and doesn’t hold back or pull punches. If you’ve ever had a stint or time of despair in your life, this book describes it so well you’ll begin to feel the bell jar all over again. I found this book reads more like a modern narrative poem than a novel. Her musings on baths, the bell jar, rebirth, and uncertainty is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I felt I was her….am her. It’s not a book you simply shake off. It sticks to you for a while. For those that have had similar trials in their life it will not only stick to you but it will make you feel as if for one moment in time lived a person who understood you. Simply it’s a masterpiece.
One flaw, I think, is Plath’s over-reliance on metaphor. Plath often attempts to come up with a powerful metaphor to describe the state of mind of her protagonist. Her metaphors are sometimes powerful and beautiful but I think she uses them too much. I think there are generally more powerful ways to convey a character’s state of mind. For example, in The Catcher in the Rye - a novel I may be referencing a lot since there are a lot of similarities between the two novels and because I think Salinger’s novel is ultimately more successful - there is a scene where Holden is quite depressed and he is riding in a Taxi cab. He reaches back into his hair and feels that some of the dampness in his air has turned to ice. This physical description is actually a more powerful way to convey Holden’s depression than a metaphor (rather than saying “I felt a loneliness as deep as the ocean”, etc.). Tone of voice can also convey a great deal. If the novel is narrated in an hysterical tone of voice, or one of the characters takes on an hysterical tone of voice, it often draws the reader right into the state of mind of the character rather than using a metaphor to describe it from the outside.
I will say that sometimes Plath's metaphors are right on the money. In one scene Esther is waiting in a waiting room to see Buddy Willard, who is a boy that she has been dating, and it is clear he is much more enthused about the relationship than she is. While she is waiting she sees a fountain and “The fountain spurted a few inches into the air from a rough length of pipe, threw up its hands, collapsed and drowned its ragged ribble in a stone basin of yellowing water.” I like this metaphor for two reasons. First, she is describing an actual physical object in the environment so its use as a metaphor here is disguised. Second, even though it is an actual object in the room it perfectly describes her feelings for Buddy Willard, it is an objective correlate in T.S. Eliot’s terms. She is trying to be excited about seeing Buddy but all she can muster is a spurt that winds up just dribbling down and drowning in its own depths. Plath is also sometimes able to convey mood powerfully without relying on metaphors: in her descriptions of her hot baths, for instance, I think we get a better feeling for her depression than in her metaphors.
Another flaw is: I do not think that the character of Esther Greenwood is as well developed as Holden Caulfield. What was Esther like before her episode of depression? Throughout the novel she can sometimes be quite cruel. Is that a result of the distorting effects of the bell jar or was that always a part of her personality? We learn that she is ambitious, and a good student, and we pick up bits and pieces here and there, but the character is vague, and her voice as a narrator is too literary to reveal much about her character. Holden does not narrate in the voice of a writer but Esther does. It feels like it is written in third-person, by Sylvia Plath, even though it is written in first-person, and is supposed to be the first-person narration of Esther Greenwood the character. When Esther says, at the very beginning of the book, “By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream” (1) it does not feel like a character speaking to us, it feels like a writing exercise. It is a well written sentence but it is not in the voice of the character. It is generic literary language, as is the line “Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep” (50). Compare this to a writer like Celine whose narrators speak in colloquial language mos of the time but can also utter a passage of the most beautiful poetry without it seeming like a literary device; it feels like it comes from the character and is something they would actually say.
The book is quite powerful in places. There is a scene where she is out with a man and he attempts to rape her. It was a frightening scene that I thought did a great job of conveying her helplessness and fear. I have often pondered the difference between seeing violence in a movie or reading about violence in a piece of literature and seeing violence in real life. A lot of the writers I like have a fairly violent aesthetic. Cormac McCarthy, for example. Violence in the works of Cormac McCarthy conveys some kind of aesthetic emotion that is difficult to describe but it is very different from the feeling one has when one sees violence in real life. I have been in a few situations in my life where violence suddenly erupted without warning and the adrenaline starts flowing immediately. It is not an aesthetic or contemplative emotion at all. I thought the scene where the man attempts to rape Esther succeeded in conveying the kind of emotion one feels when violence is actually witnessed. It made the reader feel, to some degree, what it would feel like to actually be in a situation, rather than contemplating it from an aesthetic distance.
I thought Plath’s use of foreshadowing was also a mixed bag. Foreshadowing is a great way to draw the reader in and keep their attention and their interest. I will say, I never had trouble remaining interested in Plath’s novel, but there were some foreshadows that failed to pay off. Very early in the book Esther makes reference to a corpose that Buddy makes her see. I was sort of expecting a pay off, and while Esther does eventually narrate the scene, it does not have a huge impact. On the other hand, there is some brilliant foreshadowing in the opening when Esther is contemplating the execution of the Rosenbergs when Esther can’t help wondering what it would be like to be burned alive “along all your nerves”, which foreshadows her own electroshock therapy.
All in all, I thought Plath’s novel was quite satisfying and powerful despite its flaws. I would liken it to blues music. I am not a music historian, and I actually know very little about the history of the blues, but the analogy to me is this: the blues musicians did not possess all the musical training or sophistication of the great composers. They were not composing music that was as complex or refined as Mozart or Beethoven. But, they managed to express themselves very powerfully with the means at their disposal. In some ways, more powerfully than the more refined composers. They were expressing real suffering, without filter, and people respond to it on a gut level. I think Plath’s novel is like blues music in that way. While there are some flaws in her technique no one can doubt that she is expressing something real and that connects with people. Which is why I think this novel is still so popular in spite of naysayers like Harold Bloom. Critics often attempt to tell artists how they should go about expressing themselves, as if they were trying to channel the waters of a flood, but water has a tendency to follow its own will and explode wherever it wants, and I think we should be grateful for that.
The novel gets far more interesting beginning around chapter 10 when Esther's mental illness begins to show itself much more drastically, and continues to spiral from there. The novel is largely autobiographical, and Plath's detailed descriptions of her experiences with mental illness are intriguing to say the least. Those interested in psychology could nearly use this novel as a case study. Much of the contents here overlap with known and recorded details of Plath's life, and if the reader is aware of these details, they will most certainly feel for Esther all the more strongly.
Plath's writing is solid poetic prose as one might expect, and the reading is quick. Most appreciated of all, however, was the honesty this book seems to convey; the willingness to bear all for the world to see, in all it's ugliness, insecurity, and even hope.
From a teacher perspective, I was worried this book would be difficult for my students because it is slow to begin and often dark. If you are teaching this novel, I highly recommend a focus on resilience, on seeking help, and on teaching about mental illness. I also highly recommend reading some of the more graphic chapters with students so they can be discussed. There are multiple detailed descriptions of suicide attempts. My students, however, are actually enjoying this book most of each of the books we've read this year. They like the honesty of it, and the graphic aspects and details (though we have not yet reached the notably darker mid-portions yet). They like Esther's sense of humor and her descriptions of things (especially the more adult content). Though my initial impressions of the novel were not wholly positive, I have been swayed both by the second half and my student's reactions to it. I do recommend teaching it, as there is much that can be talked about, but stick to an older age group (Juniors or Seniors. MAYBE mature Sophomores) and provide sufficient open discussion and support.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Mexico on December 31, 2023
update : readed like 100 pages and this book is quite racist. maybe this book deserved that
Reviewed in Belgium on March 25, 2024
update : readed like 100 pages and this book is quite racist. maybe this book deserved that