She kept progress reports that analyzed plot and character actions – unusual for a writer, Kukil noted – and detailed handwritten outlines that reveal how she linked actions to ideas. On advice from a writer’s handbook, she committed to putting down 1,000 words a day and completed a first draft in five months in 1961.

Plath’s disciplined approach to writing certainly worked for her. “She had the courage to follow her talents to the light as well as the dark places it led.” “‘The Bell Jar’ is one of the most powerful portrayals of madness in fiction,” Kukil said in her lecture. Famous for her confessional style of writing prose and poetry – as well as the fact that she attempted suicide several times before taking her own life at age 30 – Plath shared many experiences with her main character, Esther Greenwood – an overbearing mother, an unfulfilling guest editorship at a renowned women’s magazine in New York City, an obsession with suicide and improperly administered electroshock treatments. Perhaps Plath needed that rosy cast in order to divulge some of her most intimate thoughts and experiences in the semi-autobiographical novel that was largely based on her struggle with depression and whose characters were unabashed facsimiles of her mother, a close friend and a college sweetheart. Memorial Lecture Series, celebrating the 50 th anniversary of “The Bell Jar.” Each academic year this series offers the opportunity to study in depth a single text and to investigate why such significant literary works as “Moby Dick,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “Walden” remain relevant to modern readers. Kukil offered insight into Plath’s writing process and life for the 13 th Annual Professor John Howard Birss, Jr. Kukil, Smith’s associate curator of special collections, including the college’s collection of Plath’s writings.

Plath stole the pink paper from her alma mater, Smith College, because “she thought it would giver her novel a rose cast,” said Karen V. For the haunting portrayal of the descent into insanity that is “The Bell Jar,” author Sylvia Plath was both disciplined enough to write 1,000 words a day and a touch romantic in penning it on pink paper.

The bell jar