The relationship between the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes lasted fewer than seven years but cast a long shadow over the literary landscape of the late 20th century. In part this was because Plath, who ached for recognition in her lifetime but was always in Hughes' shadow, achieved a
stellar, posthumous reputation after she took her own life.
As a result, a generation of (particularly feminist) scholars lambasted Hughes for having stifled Plath's talent before abandoning her for another woman, and questioned the integrity of his editorship of the poems and prose (he destroyed or misplaced key entries from the journals and re-ordered the final collection, Ariel).
In 1998, Hughes, after maintaining a steadfast silence for 35 years, published a collection of poems, Birthday Letters, which briefly reignited the controversy over their partnership, although their tone was widely adjudged more mournfully wondering and loving than self-justifying. Within a few months he was dead.
Massachusetts-born Plath, who published her first poem at 8, was a sensitive, intelligent perfectionist whose promising academic and literary career was kneecapped by the psychological backwash from her father's early death.
She attempted suicide in her early 20s, an experience she immortalised in a 1963 autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, but recovered and continued studying, winning a scholarship to Cambridge. There she met and soon married the dashing Hughes, and they had two children.
They taught in the US and lived in London before settling in Devon, but when Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair the marriage collapsed.
Friendless and freezing in London (the winter she died was the coldest in centuries), Plath wrote prolifically - often finishing a poem a day - before gassing herself on February 11, 1963.
Most of her work was published posthumously and she received a Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems, edited by Hughes, almost 20 years after her death.
Hughes, a Yorkshireman, was widely regarded as one of the most distinctive and innovative poetic voices of his generation, who used imagery of the animal world to explore the conflict between the human and the divine.
He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, but some will remember him principally as the destroyer of a talent far greater than his own.
The relationship between the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes lasted fewer than seven years but cast a long shadow over the literary landscape of the late 20th century. In part this was because Plath, who ached for recognition in her lifetime but was always in Hughes' shadow, achieved a
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