The Bell Jar

First published in 1963, this novel follows Esther Greenwood, a college student on a New York fashion-magazine internship, through a summer of banquets, photo shoots, and sexual unease, then home to a Boston suburb where she cannot write, sleep, or choose a future. A rejected manuscript, a botched attachment to the medical student Buddy Willard, and a suicide attempt lead to asylum wards, insulin and electroshock, and a woman doctor who treats her as a person. Fellow patients and a city suicide she reads about shadow her recovery. The book is a first-person account of breakdown, not a magazine memoir of a single internship.

Bound in dark red cloth cover blocked with an image in black and white. Dar red endpapers. Dark red slipcase front blocked with a black pattern.