Fifty years later, the NY Times visits with eight of the twenty college women who were selected as guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine in the summer of 1953. That one month experience opens Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel, “The Bell Jar.” A few students present at the reunion were the inspiration for characters in the book, and some recounted events that were captured in its pages. These women faced the challenges of balancing their artistic dreams with family life, a decade before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was published. Plath, coincidentally, committed suicide the year of its publication.