Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage

Summary (from the publisher): Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, at the outset of their brilliant careers. Plath's suicide six and a half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable, changed his life, his closest relationships, his standing in the literary world, and the style and substance of his verse. In this stunning new biography of their marriage, Diane Middlebrook presents a portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband haunted - and nourished - his entire life by the aftermath of his first marriage.

Drawing on a trove of newly available papers Middlebrook presents Hughes as a complicated, conflicted figure: sexually magnetic, fiercely ambitious, immensely caring, and shrewd in business. She argues that Plath's suicide, though it devastated Hughes and made him vulnerable to the savage attacks of Plath's growing readership, ultimately gave him his true subject - how marriages fail and how men fail in marriage.

Writing with the penetrating insight and lucid sympathy that informed her previous bestselling biographies, Middlebrook rises to the multiple challenges presented by this highly fraught, deeply controversial subject. Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer's art and craft.

Review: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at a party in 1956. Plath recognized Hughes' name as one of the two poets whose work she had memorized earlier that afternoon. She introduced herself by loudly reciting one of his poems, yelling over the loud dance music. They moved into an adjacent room where they could talk. When Hughes suddenly kissed Plath, she retaliated by biting him on the cheek until he bled. He responded by seizing her hair band and silver earrings and storming out. He was, as Middlebrook describes it, "wearing a wedding ring of tooth marks." Although neither knew it, this was the tempestuous beginning of a marriage and a literary partnership between two of the great poets of their time. In this biography, Middlebrook presents a biography of a marriage - of Hughes in relation to Plath, and their intertwined lives and work.  

Middlebrook's biography reads like an analysis of the poets' lives as one might analyze their work. "Plath had thrown herself at Hughes chanting the poem's last words: 'I did it, I' - Hughes's first experience of Sylvia Plath was hearing her voice pronouncing his words as knowingly as if she had written them" (4). But their lives seem fraught with meaning behind every act - they lived their work and their work reflects their lives. Their writing also bounces off of each other;  metaphors seen in one's work later show in the other's. This happy partnership, a marriage filled with stormy passion, devoted hours of writing, and scraping together on the salaries of two professional writers, continued for several years, until Sylvia discovered that Ted was cheating on her and the marriage dissolved and later was ended permanently by Plath's suicide.

The second half of this biography detail the ways in which Ted's relationship with Sylvia affected the rest of Ted Hughes' life. He became the caretaker of her remaining writing, but also the villain in the eyes' of the world, especially when Assia, the woman he left Sylvia for, also committed suicide. Yet no partnership is as simple as villain and victim. Both Sylvia and Ted were guilty of altering the other's work throughout their marriage. When Sylvia learned of his affair, she cleaned out his manuscripts and letters, "dumped the papers in the stone courtyard and set them alight" (175). Similarly, after her death, took liberties as editor of Sylvia's final manuscript. He "reshuffled the poems, destroying the narrative arc that Plath had described in her notes on the manuscript. He omitted some of the poems Plath had intended to include [...]. And he added poems that Plath had not included" (226). He also lost or misplaced journals, final drafts, and more from her estate over the years after her death.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as could be suspected from their initial meeting, had an emotionally turbulent marriage. They both benefitted from their connection artistically, and they both also suffered as a result of their marriage. Middlebrook's biography is a fascinating inside look at a relationship between two artists and the impact of that relationship in their writing. Although it seems as if the world has wondered about the truth of the dynamics of their relationship, it's unlikely that we will ever fully understand. On the other hand, the sealed trunk that Ted Hughes left that will be opened in the year 2023 may potentially reveal more about this famous couple.

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