TRUE FIRST EDITION OF PLATH'S ONLY NOVEL THE BELL JAR, PUBLISHED UNDER THE PSEUDONYM VICTORIA LUCAS

(PLATH, Sylvia) LUCAS, Victoria. The Bell Jar. London: Heinemann, (1963). Octavo, original black paper boards, original dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $13,000.

First edition of Sylvia Plath's only novel, published pseudonymously only one month before her death, her powerful exploration of a brilliant yet fragile mind, in very scarce original dust jacket.

"One of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English," Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963, little more than a month after her novel The Bell Jar was published in England under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas (Oates, New York Times). Her frank, highly autobiographic account was praised as "a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems—the kind of book Salinger's Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell" (New York Times Book Review). With her "taut, controlled, colloquial yet poetic prose" Plath, in her only novel, has forever recorded "the raw experience of nightmare" (Drabble; Rosenthal). Plath's only novel would not be published under her own name until a paperback edition released in 1967. Precedes the 1971 first American edition.

Book fine, dust jacket with a touch of wear along upper edge, tiny chip to rear panel, near-fine. A bright and lovely copy.