"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
The Bell Jar was first published in London in January 1963 by William Heinemann Limited, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Sylvia Plath had adopted the pen name for publication of her first novel because she questioned its literary value and did not believe it was a "serious work"; she was also worried about the pain publication might cause to the many people close to her whose personalities she had distorted and lightly disguised in the book.
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar was first published in London in January 1963 by William Heinemann Limited, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Sylvia Plath had adopted the pen name for publication of her first novel because she questioned its literary value and did not believe it was a "serious work"; she was also worried about the pain publication might cause to the many people close to her whose personalities she had distorted and lightly disguised in the book.
The central themes of Sylvia Plath's early life are the basis for The Bell Jar. She was born in 1932 in Massachusetts and spent her early childhood years in Winthrop, a seaside town close to Boston. Her mother's parents were Austrian; her father, a distinguished professor of biology at Boston University (and an internationally known authority on bees), had emigrated to the States from Poland as an adolescent; she had one brother, two and a half years younger. A radical change occurred in Sylvia's life when she was eight: in November 1940, her father died after a long, difficult illness, and the mother and grandparents moved the family inland to the town of Wellesley, a conservative upper-middle-class suburb of Boston. While the grandmother assumed the care of the household, Mrs. Plath taught students in the medical-secretarial training program at Boston University, commuting each day, and the grandfather worked as maître d'hôtel at the Brookline Country Club, where he lived during the week. Sylvia and her brother attended the local public schools. "I went to public schools," she wrote later, "genuinely public. Everyone went." At an early age she began to write poems and to draw in pen and ink -- and to collect prizes with her first publication of each. By the time she was seventeen, her interest in writing had become disciplined and controlled. Publication, however, did not come easily; she had submitted forty-five pieces to the magazine Seventeen before her first short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again," was published in the August 1950 issue. A poem, "Bitter Strawberries," a sardonic comment on war, was accepted and published in the same month by the Christian Science Monitor. In her high school year book, The Wellesleyan, the girl who later described herself as a "rabid teenage pragmatist" was pictured:
