Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like "guilt, and guilt, and guilt": these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom. Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952—more than a decade before The Bell Jar—this feminist allegory tells the story of a young woman's fateful train journey, a trip from which there can be no going back.