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The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

Narrator Maggie Gyllenhaal

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Length 7 hours 24 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“You cannot deny that Sylvia Plath is one of the greatest writers to have lived. Ester Greenwood is the characterization of the writer. The fact that this book leaves us hanging at the end is very unsettling. Here is a woman who is less mentally/emotionally ill and more spiraling mentally because she is disenfranchised as a woman - this inequality between men and women would, did and does affect women more negatively. I feel such empathy for her, because people just didn’t understand her and inequality was just as normal/accepted as the air we breathe. She also knew she needed help but there was nothing for her at the time. This is bound to make anyone spiral. Plath does such an amazing job writing her autobiography with fictional elements. It is sad to see her demise shortly after this book was written within the year 1963 at 31 years old. Also, Ted Hughes plays a big role in her spiral with metaphors pointing to him in the book.”
— Otillia E. • Page 1 Books

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

Performed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

“A coming-of-age masterpiece. . . . Sylvia Plath has become one of the influential writers of her time.” —Boston Globe

Sylvia Plath’s masterwork—an acclaimed and enduring novel about a young woman falling into the grip of mental illness and societal pressures

Esther Greenwood is bright, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that her neurosis 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.

Classics Fiction

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.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's stunning performance in the film Secretary garnered her a Golden Globe nomination, an Independent Spirit Award nomination and awards from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the National Board of Review. She recently appeared in the Oscar-nominated film Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.