Nov 03 Hughes and Plath

Ted and Sylvia

With the release of a new biography and Sylvia, a feature film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, it seems that interest in Sylvia Plath and her Poet Laureate husband, Ted Hughes, is anything but waning. To read more about this infamous couple, scroll down.


	To call a six-and-a-half-year marriage that ended in death a success seems ludicrous, but as Diane Middlebrook argues in Her Husband, the matrimony between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was indeed hugely successful. While she was living, it was her troubled marriage to philandering Ted that fuelled her best writing. In death, it was Ted who, as guardian of her work, would build her legacy—and his. To read more, click here.
	As part of Faber and Faber's Poet to Poet series, in which a contemporary poet selects and introduces the work of a poet of the past, Ted Hughes selects poems by Slyvia Plath. By doing so, we gain insight into Hughes's own work, his personal and critical reactions to his wife's poetry, and a surprising look at the relationship between the two. To read more about Sylvia Plath Selected by Ted Hughes, click here.
	The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's best-known work, is famous not only because it was the only novel the gifted poet ever wrote, but also because it was published only a month before she took her own life. This arresting autobiographical account of Esther Greenwoods' breakdown following an internship at a magazine in New York City is drawn with such consummate skill, that at times Esther's insanity appears real and rational. To read more about this American classic, click here.
	As the final word in Ted Hughes's career, Collected Poems gathers together five decades' worth of work, from magazine publications to children's poems. This beautiful testament to the prolific poet includes everything from Hughes's first award-winning collection, The Hawk in the Rain (which was published in 1959, just after his marriage to Plath), to the 1988 collection Birthday Letters, an intensely personal set of poems capturing Hughes's response to his wife's suicide. Click here to read more.
For more on Sylvia Plath, check out the Sylvia Plath Forum or preview the feature film Sylvia starring Gwyneth Paltrow. For more on Ted Hughes, have a look at the Centre for Ted Hughes Studies.

Penguin.ca