The Bell Jar

One of our hand-picked classics that no home should be without, now with Beya Rebaï's beautifully atmospheric artwork.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into mental illness. The Bell Jar broke the boundaries between fiction and reality and helped cement Sylvia Plath's place as an enduring feminist icon. Celebrated for its darkly humorous, razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, it continues to resonate with readers today as testament to the universal human struggle to claim one's rightful place in the world.

A special illustrated edition - the second book in our collection of illustrated Faber classics.

About the Author

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963); Ariel was published posthumously in 1965. Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

About the Illustrator

Beya Rebai is based in Paris where she's born in 1995. She studied illustration in Brussels, Belgium, during three years. She proceeded with a master degree in Paris. Fascinated by colour, especially by the artistic current of the Nabis, she builds her drawings with a narrow and carefully selected colour range. Beya always has a sketchbook during her travels with some wax pastels, she draws what she sees, but in her way, with a lot of colours.