In “Loving Sylvia Plath,” Emily Van Duyne focuses on Plath’s life and poetry as exemplars of the struggle for liberation from a patriarchal value system that celebrated marriage and motherhood as a woman’s primary responsibilities, refusing to acknowledge that these roles might not be fulfilling or pleasurable for everyone. Her particular emphasis is on Plath as a survivor of intimate partner violence, a subject that entered general public consciousness in 2017, when Plath’s 1962 letters to her psychiatrist were offered at auction, and newspaper articles described their assertions that Hughes had physically abused her as shocking. “No Plath scholar I knew was surprised,” Van Duyne writes.
Emily Van Duyne’s angry, impassioned book could easily be retitled “Hating Ted Hughes.” It is strongest in its blistering portrait of Hughes as the abusive, unfaithful husband who began to manipulate Sylvia Plath’s literary legacy and personal reputation immediately after her suicide in 1963. Van Duyne is also effective in her takedown of the literary establishment that closed ranks around Hughes to protect him against feminist pushback from the 1970s on. She is less effective, regrettably, in capturing Plath in her entirety as a woman and an artist.
She goes on to note that suspicions that the Hughes-Plath relationship was violent were voiced as early as 1970, when Robin Morgan included in her anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful” a poem by Plath about a sadistic husband and abused wife that Hughes kept out of the collection titled “Ariel” he published in 1965. In 1972, Morgan published a poem, “Arraignment,” which accused Hughes of causing Plath’s death. (Van Duyne overstates this as “she claimed that Ted Hughes had raped and murdered Sylvia Plath.”) The poem also mentioned Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Hughes left Plath and with whom he lived intermittently for several years, who had killed herself and their 4-year-old daughter in 1969. “What a coincidence,” Morgan commented sarcastically.
Van Duyne describes at length Hughes’s efforts to suppress or discredit any criticism of his marriage to Plath and his handling of her literary estate. (Because they were separated but not divorced when Plath died, he was her executor and controlled her unpublished writings.) She documents the way Hughes shaped Plath’s posthumously published poetry to support his vision of her life and work. Plath had left a binder containing the 40 poems she intended to include in “Ariel” on her desk. Hughes removed those he deemed “personally aggressive,” which usually meant they described a volatile marriage, and included poems written in the three months before her death when, Van Duyne comments, her doctor judged that she was suffering from “psychotic depression.” These poems helped buttress the impression, reinforced by numerous early commentators, that Plath was obsessed with death and that the brilliant poetry of her final months somehow inevitably led to her suicide.
All this material is compelling and well argued; it would be a diehard admirer of Ted Hughes indeed who did not come away with the conviction that he was a deeply troubled man (Van Duyne includes some disturbing examples of his fragile mental state before and after Plath’s death) determined to deny that he bore any responsibility for her suicide and willing to use his considerable influence to make sure of it. Van Duyne also does a good job of arousing scorn for the literary pundits who over the years have depicted multiple revelations by and about women Hughes mistreated as the unnecessary airing of the dirty laundry of “a fine poet and a complicated man,” as Irish writer John Banville put it.
Van Duyne gets into the weeds with her dive into the convoluted history of stymied Plath biographies, particularly efforts in the 1970s by three women: Elizabeth Hinchcliffe, Lois Ames, and Harriet Rosenstein. Van Duyne’s point — insofar as it can be gleaned from endless confusing details about their research and odd hints that it drove at least one of these would-be biographers to a nervous breakdown — seems to be that these women had access to material that has since vanished. It’s well known that Hughes destroyed some of Plath’s journals and removed pages from others; Van Duyne apparently hopes there are still documents out there that might enrich our knowledge about Plath.
This may be a covert recognition that her portrait of Plath is partial. Herself a survivor of a violent marriage, Van Duyne acknowledges with commendable frankness that this experience has shaped her approach here. But viewing Plath’s late poetry primarily as the work of “a survivor of intimate partner violence trying to feel her way into freedom” leads her to scant the powerful woman who wrote lines like, “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Van Duyne clearly does not intend to present Plath as a helpless victim, but the book sometimes reads that way. This is reinforced by her tendency to overstate how successful Hughes’s defenders were in silencing other voices; when he published “Birthday Letters” six months before his death in 1998, for example, plenty of Plath scholars loudly and publicly criticized his one-sided portrait of their marriage.
There’s much to admire in “Loving Sylvia Plath,” but it’s an addition to Plath studies, not quite the “reclamation” of the subtitle. Heather Clark’s massive 2020 biography, “Red Comet,” though it lacks some material on Hughes’ violence made public since then, remains the most complete and nuanced consideration.
LOVING SYLVIA PLATH: A Reclamation
By Emily Van Duyne
Norton, 336 pages, $27.99
Wendy Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America” and a two-time finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s Excellence in Reviewing citation.