Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

This disquieting debut from Van Duyne, a writing professor at Stockton University, examines how Ted Hughes’s physical and psychological abuse of his wife, Sylvia Plath, shaped her life, work, and legacy. Chronicling Hughes’s violent outbursts, Van Duyne notes that he strangled Plath on their honeymoon in 1956 and hit her while she was pregnant in 1961 (she miscarried two days later). A particularly devastating chapter details the life of Assia Wevill, whose affair with Hughes provoked Plath to leave him. Hughes also abused Wevill, Van Duyne writes, suggesting he likely contributed to Wevill’s decision in 1969 to gas herself and the four-year-old daughter she’d had with Hughes. Shedding light on how Hughes hid his misdeeds from public scrutiny, Van Duyne explains that he excised “poems about a violent marriage and disrupted love affair” from Plath’s posthumous poetry collection, Ariel, and destroyed the unfinished manuscript for her second novel, which was reportedly “about the breakup of a marriage.” Van Duyne argues that Hughes’s subterfuge was abetted by male literary critics who interpreted Ariel as a “poetic death wish” while glossing over its “critique of marriage and motherhood,” ensuring that Hughes “was excused of any responsibility” for Plath’s death. An incriminating account exposing the depths of Hughes’s cruelty, this is sure to reignite debate in literary circles. (July)