This is Sylvia Plath's only novel, and probably largely autobiographical. The narrator, Esther Greenwood, young, ambitious and intelligent, arrives in New York one hot summer to work on a women's magazine. As she tries to adjust to what she sees as the sophistication of the city she slowly slides into a nervous breakdown. I liked the controlled stark prose and the narrator's flashes of self-deprecatory humour, as well as the glimpses of 1950s New York.
(Diana Davies - bwl 35 July 2006 ) |
