Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Reading groups chosen for The Bell Jar 50th anniversary celebration project


The Reading Agency and publishers Faber and Faber have selected five lucky reading groups to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Sylvia Plath’s modern classic, The Bell Jar.

 
Bath-based ‘Reading in the Bath’ reading group; ‘Rampant Readers’ from Leicester; the all-male ‘Hertfordshire Book Group’; young Reading Activists from Portsmouth’s Beddow Library and young readers from Rugby School in Warwickshire will now review and blog about the book throughout 2013. They will be given sets of Faber's special 50th anniversary edition of Plath’s acclaimed novel, which follows New York fashion magazine intern Esther Greenwood’s dreams of becoming a writer and her struggles with work; difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously, setting her life sliding out of control.
 
The five chosen reading groups will also have special access to online resources and content from Faber and Faber during the course of the project, including archive photographs and cover galleries and an online timeline and biography of Sylvia Plath's life.
 
This special project was brokered by national charity The Reading Agency’s Reading Partners consortium, which creates successful and exciting events and activities for readers. Reading Partners involves the whole UK public library network and 40 publishers, and works to transform the way publishers and libraries work together. (Please see “Notes to editors” for more information.) Reading groups across the UK were invited to apply via The Reading Agency’s Reading Groups For Everyone website: the five participating groups were chosen to span both generations and gender following a strong response, with 31 groups applying.
 
“We're really excited about being involved in this project as it gives us a chance to re engage with The Bell Jar, a classic book which many of us read as teenagers. It will be interesting to see how different our understanding of it will be now we are all older,” says Sarah Ormes on behalf of ‘Reading in the Bath’ reading group.
 
Sandeep Mahal, who leads The Reading Agency’s Reading Partners work, says: “The socialisation of reading is being fuelled by fascinating new blends of online and offline reading experiences, and this is reflected in the terrific response from reading groups wanting to take part in this project. We'll be working closely with the five chosen groups to gather opinion and generate discussion about The Bell Jar's relevance in today's world, and how it feels to rediscover a novel that has been so important to so many young readers. The groups will be looking at the writer, the text and the potency of its subject matter, and talking about them online, alongside a real time, physical reading experience in their local library. What a great opportunity to revisit and celebrate the enduring appeal of Sylvia Plath's work!”
 
Sarah Savitt, paperbacks manager for publishers Faber, says: "Sylvia Plath is one of Faber's key writers and it's fantastic to be partnering with The Reading Agency during the 50th anniversary year for The Bell Jar. That the novel remains relevant and loved and passionately discussed by readers of all ages is wonderful and we can't wait to hear from the readers involved in this project. Faber is committed to working with libraries and reading groups and this is one of our most exciting collaborations so far."
 
  • Sylvia Plath (1932-63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

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