First US edition of Plath's only novel, originally published in the UK in 1963 under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" and unpublished in the US until after her death.
Very good plus in a near fine jacket.
Price: $750.00
"Her work is brutal, like the smash of a fist" - Hardwick
Plath's self-described 'potboiler' was damned with dismissive praise in its own day as a sort of girl's CATCHER IN THE RYE. (Though, as Heather Clark notes, if Esther Greenwood has a male antecedent, it is not Holden Caulfield but Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.) Harrowingly personal and famously autobiographical, THE BELL JAR is also overtly political: an "indictment of the fifties in America," an adolescent girls' book "written by a woman who has been to hell and back and wants to revenge herself on her tormentors. It is a girls' book filled with poison, vomit, blood, and volts of electricity" (Malcolm).
Read more: Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman; Clark, Red Comet; Elizabeth Hardwick, "On Sylvia Plath."
First printing. New York: Harper & Row, (1971). 8'' x 5.5''. Original burgundy cloth. In original unclipped ($6.95) dust jacket by Amy Isbey Duevell. Lavender endpapers. Pink topstain, fore-edge machine deckle. Biographical note at rear illustrated with eight pen and ink drawings by Plath. Jacket has touched of rubbing, shelfwear. Overall, sharp. Book has slight lean, rubbing to board extremities, some toning to rear endpapers. Else sound and clean.
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