Exploring The Bell Jar
I’m currently in a book club/class on Sylvia Plath, and this Sunday we start on The Bell Jar. You know I am always researching and searching for information. I found some interesting things while reading the first nine chapters.
Audio interview with Joanne Greenberg, who wrote her own mental illness memoir, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by one of the women at Mademoiselle with Sylvia, who was memorialized as a character in The Bell Jar. In this interview, she tells Joanne these interns could never look at each other again after reading The Bell Jar, and that their portrayal ended interns’ marriages, included her own.
An outline of the manuscript of The Bell Jar in Sylvia’s handwriting on Smith paper; the accompanying article explains a coda she had planned.
All of the different covers of The Bell Jar throughout its publication
All of her works:
Poetry collections:
Ariel (two editions, Ted Hughes’ version and Sylvia’s restored, intended version)
Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices
Winter Trees
Selected Poems
Collected prose and novels:
The Bell Jar, originally under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
The Magic Mirror, Plath’s Smith College senior thesis
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
Children’s books:
The Bed Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake
The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit
Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen
Collected Children’s Stories
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