13th Annual Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Memorial Lecture/Exhibition: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

The 13th Annual Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Memorial Lecture/Exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Rare Books at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, will present a keynote lecture, and co-ordinated the loan of about 59 Plath artifacts/manuscripts/facsimiles from the Sylvia Plath Collection, for the exhibition. Among other items in the exhibit are Plath's 1950-1953 journal, her Royal typewriter, photographs, letters, and typescripts.

Karen will present her lecture "The Bell Jar at 50" on 27 February 2013, at 3:30PM Global Heritage Hall, G01, Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island.

The exhibit, prepared by Christine S. Fagan, the Collection Development/Acquisitions Librarian at RWU, is free and open to the public and will run from 1 February to 10 March 2013. If you are anywhere near Bristol, do yourself a favor and visit the exhibit. If you are nowhere near Bristol: somehow please get there.

Along with Associate Curator of Rare Books Karen V. Kukil and Amanda Ferrara (Smith Class of 2013) and Christine Fagan, Heidi Benedict, and Liz Haines of Roger Williams University, I was honored to be a part of the exhibit installation crew, which is sponsored by The Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Memorial Library Fund and was able to take photographs of all the good people involved as it took shape. Below is a selection of these images, which have had to be reduced in size so as to not show too much...

Exhibit overview

Amanda hanging the exhibit

Please do not feed the animals.

Karen and Amanda

Karen

Christine, pleased with the progress

Amanda Ferrara will curate another version of this show at Smith College - titled "The Bell Jar Revisited" - which will be on display in the Book Arts Gallery, Neilson Library, 3 June-8 September 2013.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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