Sylvia Plath, 1963

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath, 1963
[PLATH, Sylvia as:] LUCAS, Victoria (1932-1963). The Bell Jar. London: Heinemann, 1963.

First edition of Plath's thinly veiled autobiography published in England pseudonymously a month before her February 1963 death. Plath had returned to London with her two young children during the brutally cold winter of 1962, renting a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (an address once inhabited by William Butler Yeats). Though that autumn had been a period of intense activity as she produced the poems that would comprise Ariel, depression nonetheless overtook her. The Bell Jar, her only novel, did not appear under her own name until 1967 and, in accordance with the wishes of her mother and Ted Hughes, was not published in the United States until 1971.

Octavo. Original cloth; pictorial dust-jacket (very minor rubbing to extremities); custom box.