Plath's language is a joy, even if her experiences are not. Despite the best attempts of her long-suffering mother, Esther, feeling trapped under her 'bell jar', disintegrates into attempted suicide and incarceration with electro shock therapy, all detailed in visceral language. The difference between fact and fiction is that Esther Greenwood - who seems to have it all going for her but slides into terrifying mental illness - survives to tackle the rest of her life, whereas Sylvia Plath did not. This inescapable historical fact inhabits everyone's reading of the novel for the last fifty years and gives the story a haunting and shocking power.
This is Canongate's fitting tribute to Sylvia Plath: a sophisticated production of her classic and only novel published in UK in 1963, a month before she gassed herself.
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