The Bell Jar

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.

Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.