Sylvia Plath

A first edition of Plath's only novel, published in London under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" and unpublished in the US until after her death.

• Sylvia Plath (American).
• London: Heinemann, 1963.
• 258 pages.
• Bound in the original black paper boards, gilt-lettered spine, in original unclipped (18s) color pictorial dust jacket designed by Thomas Simmonds.

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).