[PLATH, Sylvia as:]. LUCAS, Victoria (1932-1963). The Bell Jar. London: Heinemann, 1963.

8vo. Original cloth gilt-lettered on spine; in unrestored pictorial dust jacket (price-clipped, some spotting verso, some rippling, a few short tears occasionally repaired verso). Provenance: Susan M. Seale (signature on front free endpaper).

FIRST EDITION of Plath's only novel, a roman à clef published pseudonymously one month before her death. Plath reportedly began writing the novel in 1961 following the publication of The Colossus, and finished the work in August of that year. Describing the work to her mother, Plath wrote: "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar" (qtd. in Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, Biographical Note p.294-5). The Bell Jar would not appear under her name until 1967 and was blocked from publication in the United States by her mother and Ted Hughes until 1971.