Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath

by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

In Lives Revised, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick engages the entangled life stories of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath to recover details, nuances, and perspectives excluded from previous biographies. Based on extensive archival work at the British Library and Emory University, as well as unpublished materials in private hands, Goodspeed-Chadwick considers how biographical storylines are constructed, reconceived, and dismantled across decades of research and interpretation. Her work plumbs the practical challenges and interpretive possibilities of biographies that engage with difficult subjects such as Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, particularly given the personal traumas, tragic ends, and competing legacies involved.

Drawing on documents and recordings only recently made available to researchers, Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath recovers previously inaccessible accounts about its subjects, contextualizes them within the critical traditions of feminism and trauma studies, and asks readers and scholars to rethink previous conclusions about three complex figures in literary and cultural history.

Winner of the 2025 Lewis P. Simpson Award

196 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2025

About the author

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Ph.D., Indiana University Columbus, Chancellor’s Professor of English, Professor of English, Affiliate Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Office of Student Research

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took up this project with the hope of more firmly establishing new and reframing old narratives, especially in connection with Assia Wevill, whom I view as a victim in a tragedy with many victims. For it is too simplistic to cast Assia as the foil to Plath and pit them against each other. Assia is more than the cold, destructive, unnatural, and beautiful woman Plath characterized her as, and she is more than the persecuted, dangerous, desirable, destructive, and demonic force Hughes portrayed her as.

I came to this intrigued by the hook of previously unpublished material on Wevill, and there is some of this, particularly in the second section. However, most of it is responses to Wevill from the Plath-Hughes circle following Plath's suicide and so it is hardly 'innocent' of the tragedy that has already occurred. What this doesn't do is offer any substantial new illuminations into the relationship between Hughes and Wevill while he was still married or the consequent affair - at least, nothing we haven't seen already from the old Bates biography of Hughes and the recent magisterial biography of Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark, copiously quoted in this book.

This book seems to be more framing than analysis and chapters frequently wander off into areas that, while related, are hardly revolutionary: the impact of gender ideologies both historical and contemporary, discourses of race and colonialism around Wevill (who came from a family of Holocaust survivors while having lost some of her extended Jewish family), the necessity of understanding the situatedness of interviewees are all correct but well established. It feels underwhelming, for example, that at 55% of the way in, we get faced with a questions like 'how might race, gender, sexuality, ability, class or sex impact this subject' as if we've never heard of intersectionality before or thought of applying it to biographical subjects.

The most valuable sections for me were those focusing closely on Wevill herself, both the recorded interviews, newly released, compiled for a potential biography that never happened; and the assessment of what she herself said in her writings (letters, journals) about her relationship with Hughes, including the controversial topics of sexualised violence, even here suggested rape, that are also active in representations of his relationship with Plath.

The main theoretical intervention that this book makes is the use of trauma theory applied to all three participants, though there's a particular emphasis on Hughes in the wake of the double suicide. It's also suggestive that Assia is represented as being herself haunted by Plath.

In the end, the conclusion is that this was a complicated triangular affair and that all the participants were complex personalities drawn into a tragedy. We may be warned not to take one-sided views of any of the three, Plath, Hughes or Wevill... but, again, that's hardly news really, is it? I'll also just add a picky note about the inelegant writing: there's an authorial tic of inverting verb and subject like 'wonders Assia' that is overused, and a rash of dangling participles such as shown above in the heading quotation of this review.

In summary, this is worth a read for anyone obsessed (as I am!) with Plath and interested in Wevill without wanting to subscribe to the sexist and misogynist ways in which she has been written in the past - but that aspect has, largely, been overcome in modern scholarship anyway.

Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC

[Wendy Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath", Dr. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick breaks the binary to show that a person need not be "good" or "bad", regardless of long-standing opinion. Her scholarship in trauma studies and women's, gender, and sexuality studies allow Goodspeed-Chadwick to offer informed perspectives that consider the many facets that intersect to influence an individual's personality and behaviors.

Through this exhaustive, yet easily navigable, lens, "Lives Revised" gives the reader the opportunity to view Assia Wevill both in relation to and independently of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes comprehensively, perhaps, for the first time. Finally, we are able to formulate our own, more educated, vision of Wevill. A vision that considers a fuller representation of the spectrum, not as a necessary opposite of the "good" or "bad" end of the binary.

Assia Wevill, the woman, mother, author, lover, and human, with a personality and life as complex as any one of us, is deserving of the meticulous research and varied perspectives afforded her by Goodspeed-Chadwick. This work is an indispensable contribution to the study of a life that will, no doubt, endurably influence scholars' thoughts on biographies and the treatment of them. To view Assia Wevill through such diverse perspectives as those compiled in this work releases her from the stronghold of long-standing biases, allowing her to be seen as the complicated individual that she was. One that, surely, deserves such treatment.

[Spinster · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am biased: I think Hughes was a shitty person and a minor poet (I said what I said) and I'm interested in reading about him only as relates to Plath and how he controlled and managed her image after her death. Wevill...well, I'm ready to accept that she was far more intelligent and sensitive than she's usually portrayed as being (the femme fatale thing is so boring, isn't it?) but I also confess to being largely uninterested in her writing or her translation work.

Obviously a big part of her tragic arc was that she felt less than Plath (and Hughes) in key ways--not a genius, not a poet, not a writer. Not able to get him to marry her (barf), disapproval from his parents. Beautiful, yes, but that always fades. Dredging up all of her writing to say "actually she wasn't as bad as everyone said" seems so obvious as to be pointless, but hey. What do I know about anything?

What I'd love to see is a treatment of Assia and Plath that's written by someone with a novelist's style and eye for detail. There are points to be made about this trio of people that aren't quite coming together here.

I await the opening of the Plath family archive at Yale to seek more insight into--okay, I'll be honest. Dirt. I'm seeking gossip and dirt.

[josephine 💖🎀✨🏹🌷 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a masterpiece and I would read anything this author writes. Another one of Dr. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s amazing pieces of work. Everyone should read this.