Elstree’s Studios’ damning original reader’s report for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
 
3pp. Typed on rectos only. Reader’s delivery stamp to first page dated 5th February 1963.
Elstree Studios’ original reader’s report rejecting The Bell Jar, written weeks after Sylvia Plath’s only novel was published, and issued just nine days before her death.
 
The Bell Jar was Sylvia Plath’s own novel, and was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in January 1963. The reader's report for Elstree notes the Type of Material as “Mental breakdown”, and that they obtained the book on 29th January 1963.
 
The man who wrote the reader’s report for The Bell Jar was Jack Common [1903-1969]. A regular contributor at Elstree’s Reading Department, Common, a working-class socialist, was a novelist and essayist from Newcastle who became friends with George Orwell when both were writing for The Adelphi magazine early in their careers. Common rose to edit The Adelphi in 1935-6, but could never make an adequate living from his published writing despite critical acclaim, and in the last twenty years of his life wrote innumerable reader’s reports for Elstree, before his death from lung cancer in 1969.
 
Common, usually a safe pair of hands, did not warm to The Bell Jar. His report’s conclusion finds the book not only unfilmic but unliterary:
 
‘This one lacks vividness and passion, reads in fact almost like a second-hand account. The experiences recorded here have been much better handled elsewhere, in THE HA-HA [by Jennifer Dawson, pub. Anthony Blond, 1961] and several others. I see no reason for buying this version.’
 
Plath herself was also unsure about the novel. She doubted its chances of success, and was worried about making public the scenes which were clearly autobiographical. The Bell Jar was published by Heinemann on 14 January 1963 and, like the first edition of the book, this report credits the author as ‘Victoria Lucas’. Jack Common’s report was written on 2 February and submitted to ABPC’s Reading Department three days later, on the fifth. Sylvia Plath died by suicide on 11 February 1963.
 
Film production companies have been basing themselves at Elstree since 1914, and in most cases, their archives have been dispersed, lost or destroyed. This unique and hitherto unknown document from surviving ABPC reader reports has not been seen since its composition sixty years ago and has never before been offered for sale.