Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage

by Diane Wood Middlebrook

Traces the more than six-year marriage between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, which ended with Plath's suicide, profiling Hughes as a complicated and magnetic figure possessing a shrewd and ambitious business sense, and noting how many blamed him for Plath's death. 75,000 first printing.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography Memoir, History, Audiobook, Memoir

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Middlebrook, who taught at Stanford for 35 years, was perhaps best known for Anne Sexton: A Biography. Its intense scrutiny of the poet's life made it "one of the turning points of late 20th-century biography," according to the newspaper. Middlebrook published several other well-received biographies and works of criticism, and was known for funding various arts organizations and literary salons for women. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington in 1961 and earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1968. She married Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth-control pill in 1985.

Reviews

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whenever I try to say something, anything, about the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes situation, I sound like a marriage counselor - a very, very bad marriage counselor. Diane Middlebrook's efforts here are certainly better than anything I could come up with in way of making sense of it all. But nothing, really, is figured out really. But this is not to say that I don't have opinions - oh, I have opinions. After reading this book, then delving again into Plath's diaries, and reading her poems (and some of Hughes') I feel grubby, exhausted, ruddled by feelings of inferiority and a little cross, a little bedazzled.

I don't like Ted Hughes. And yet while reading Middlebrook's book, the more uncomfortable I was with my antipathy towards Ted "Huge" Hughes. I still don't like his poems, and I think he treated Plath badly (but didn't cause her suicide). But some of my disgust is sexual-animal (Hughes would love that) - his massive glowering handsomeness, that drooping forelock (a Hitlerian forelock - I think this might be where Plath got that "Mein Kampf look" from "Daddy.") He would've petrified me had a time machine allowed me to meet him, mano a mano, in 1956 at that party at Cambridge. I'm 6'2" so it is not size - but I got nothing on him in terms of looks and charisma or self-confidence. Had Plath stopped to chat me up - she was working the room, according to Middlebrook, sizing up the men - she would've spit me out after a minute or less. I know this, and I resent it. Not in a sharp way - I am too old for that - but I am pretty sure how I would've felt at 24 (and all the cover-ups I would've tried - "Yeah, Ted is a nice guy, but he is kind of a jerk. And dandruffy too."). But from the perspective of middle age, there are things about Hughes - the way he presented himself - which strike me as being very calculated, very much a product of a very handsome man who is also very smart and sexually ambitious. Take those grungy clothes: Middlebrook tells us "he bought his corduroy cheap from a factory owned by one of the prosperous members of his mother's family, up in West Yorkshire, and dyed it black himself" (p. 5)." Such a lot of effort to look slovenly! The black corduroy, the iffy grooming, the bad manners; a good-looking man can employ these things artfully - whereas those of us who aren't handsome can't really pull it off. Had Hughes, with his looks, been immaculately groomed, he would've appealed conventionally to conventional (I only mean non-artsy, non-Bohemian) women. Without dressing down, Hughes would've been the Literary Baldwin Brother. But Hughes knew what (and who) he wanted, and he turned himself into the rough beast slouching out of Yorkshire. It worked like a charm, again and again and again. As with Bill Clinton, I keep asking myself - as uncharismatic, ugly men will - why did women keep falling for this shtick?

Well, Plath famously fell for Ted Hughes, then tried to tame him. And sometimes I truly felt sorry for Hughes. She married him because of his raw magnetism and untamability - all the things she then spent the next six years trying to smooth out (she agonized over this in her diary). Ah, in mating we want strength and pizzazz, but in settling down we want reliability and consistency. And yet that Hughes stuck it out as long as he did is not, as he tried to portray it - subtly, cleverly - for years afterward, a product of his good character and capacity for love and patience. Mostly I think it was because Plath gave him what he wanted most - a stable platform (and a drive and focus he lacked) to become a famous poet. Once established and once the old lady started becoming too much of a nag, and as soon as the sexy neighbor's wife showed up, Hughes fled.

But let me clarify "nag" - Plath ran an orderly house, and to some extent used housework, purchases, and interior decorating, as a balm to her troubled soul. Not an uncommon thing. The way she ran her (and his) literary career was also well-organized, energetic, and perhaps relentless - and Hughes benefited enormously from this (Plath sent out his stuff and first got him noticed). Ted needed nagging and he was shrewd enough to know it. And then there was Plath's possessiveness, which was ferocious - something Hughes is a bit hypocritical to protest, since Plath was sort of doing the ferocious mate thing he professed to love (plus he cheats). Not in my burrow, apparently. Middlebrook sympathetically points out Hughes' side of things throughout the book - at one point, Hughes keeps count of how many times Plath interrupts him during a single morning's writing time - 104 times - a number said to be an actual count. His complaints about being held financial hostage for a new set of dining room chairs also struck me as a reasonable complaint.

So Hughes fled. Famously fled. And man, did he flee. I've read some Plath biographies, but the details are hazy. Middlebrook outlines it - Plath's assertion that Hughes "deserted" her is hard to argue with. During an attempt to reconcile during a trip to Ireland he ran away - for a prearranged trip to Spain with his new mistress Assia Wevill. He even prearranged to have a telegram sent and left at the house. The Plaths had two little kids by then, a toddler and an infant, and he just disappeared. Hughes later pled, to his ex-mother-in-law Aurelia Plath, "temporary insanity." Elsewhere, outrageously, Hughes also claims that his final decision to leave was because of his mother-in-law; he couldn't stand her sentimentality, he said (she was visiting - just for a month or so). This is preposterous, but I sympathized with Hughes when he accused his wife of sentimentality. Middlebrook makes a good case: "he may have feared what was portended by those little hearts and flowers Plath was painting so zealously on the cradles, the lintels, the thresholds to the rooms they shared...(p. 181). Yeah, my tolerance for "little hearts" painted all over the house is pretty low too. And yet let me defend sentimentality - it is, as Wallace Stevens said, a "failure of emotion." Some people spend their whole lives in a haze of sentimentality and it seems to work out for them - although I cannot help but thinking the deathbed experience must be a bit puzzling for them. But sentimentality can also serve as a kind of social lubricant, a way of keeping every encounter - love and hate - from turning into a towering conflict of Integrity and Honesty (and Selfishness). Most of us can't handle things at that pitch every single moment. Plath certainly couldn't and her writings are full of sentimentality of the goopiest sort (letters to her mother and elsewhere). But Plath knew the difference between sentimentality and real life - just read her poems. Did Hughes know she knew?

So what happened? It occurred to me, reading this book, Plath and Hughes lacked a sense of humor. Plath of course could be witty - but wit - her nasty, satirical portraits of people she met, such poems as "Face Lift" - is not what I mean. Wit is not really humor. Nowhere in the life of Hughes-Plath is there what I would consider humor. Self-deprecation - for sure Plath could practice self-loathing, Hughes perhaps a simulacrum of this - but humor? I just don't see it. Ambition, grim intensity, and, for a time, great sex. Apparently that'll only get you so far in a marriage... Once, Middlebrook reports Plath and a friend rolled on the floor with laughter after Plath read her newly-composed "Daddy" (which reminds me of similar stories about Kafka). In this case, sometimes things are so intense, so lacerating, that you have to laugh. Not sure this constitutes a sense of humor in the way I mean. They seemed incapable of just goofing. As for Hughes, he's as funny as an Easter Island statue. Looks like one too...

Now, before I get too self-satisfied here with my lack-of-humor observation, Robert Frost once said (in his Letters to Untermeyer) “I own that any form of humor shows fear and inferiority… (p. 166)" That rings true to me - people often think I am funny, by the way - Hughes and Plath were anything but fearful and they never felt inferior - self-loathing is not the same thing as feeling inferior. Humor, like sentimentality can be a dodge, a way to deflect seriousness, consequences....life. (Will I joke with the nurses on my deathbed, unable to do anything but joke?) So yeah, humor might've saved the Plath-Hughes marriage, but saved it for what?

***

Conventional wisdom has it that Ted Hughes had, at the beginning, the superior talent, while Plath "developed" more slowly, her genius released by the trauma of his desertion, etc. I just don't see it that way at all. Ted Hughes is a mediocre poet at best and always was. His early successes - as many literary successes are - were a product of time and place. Al Alvarez, in an important first critical piece, praised him extravagantly as an antidote to the fusty, conventional verse of the English establishment poets. This is probably a fair assessment (I don't know a lot about '50s UK establishment verse), but it doesn't necessarily mean Hughes' actual individual poems are enduring. And I think they are not. Hughes, with hard work, image-polishing, and literary networking, made for himself a most successful, and most conventional, English literary career (Poet Laureate - you don't get any more establishment than that). But it is not the career or success I object to - I just don't like Hughes' poems - I don't like their pomposity, their turn-it-up-to-eleven-all-the-time phony intensity; mostly I don't like the quasi-mythical quasi-religious hocus pocus. I detest his rhetoric of nature, those hawks and the rest of his corny menagerie. I think Plath (and Larkin) are far more aware of the animal inside all of us than Hughes ever is, despite all the rabbit-snaring and pike-angling. And as for "The Birthday Letters," I was not impressed. Talk about sentimentality! Those poems struck me as being the slack, old-guy stuff a lot of "difficult" poets resort to in old age when they realize nobody is really reading their earlier work - a family tragedy often triggers this - see Donald Hall's poems about his dying wife and Edward Hirsch's recent book in verse on the death of his troubled son.

This is not to say Ted Hughes wasn't talented. He was. But talent is a pretty common thing. It's what you do with it that matters, and Sylvia Plath should be the Patron Saint of Talent. She was talented, but she was not, the way, say, Yeats or Emily Dickinson were, a genius. But she wrote, towards the end, genius-level poems, and she did this - not merely because of the catastrophic emotional pressures she endured, both neuro-chemical and situational, but because she worked really, really hard. And, just as importantly, she developed a self-critical apparatus that was relentless (and may have to some extent destroyed her) and absolutely necessary to producing great - not good, not acceptable, not prize-winning - art. As for raw talent, I'd say Plath and Hughes were - as Middlebrook and others claim - about equally matched. But Hughes was a true believer - in himself, in his quasi-religious mishmash of astrology-nature-Jungian Archetypes-Robert Graves' White Goddess - and true believers can write anything, so long as it is orthodox, so long as the poet is being "true to themselves." But much of what we think is being "true to ourselves" is excuse-mongering in order to do whatever it is we want to do. Hughes' constant "falling in love" and all his passionate folderols strike me, again and again, as a justification of bedding beautiful ladies (Middlebrook does not see things this way). Plath was, despite her vast outpouring of chirpy self-assertions and achievement reckonings, deeply critical of her self and her work. A lot of her chirpiness (and sentimentality - see above) came, I'd guess, from just being tired at the end of the day, a day spent writing really good poems (and childrearing and housekeeping). Her self-lacerations are a key difference. Hughes too wrote a lot of poems, to the point where he got really good at Ted Hughes kind of poems. Let's see how long they last.

***

Before reading Middlebrook's book, I knew very little about Ted Hughes' post-Plath biography. She gives a very sympathetic view of those years, sometimes with lingering looks at his graying chest hair. And a lot of stuff about how his poetry grew and so on, which I found unconvincing. Assia Wevill's ghastly suicide-murder (of their four-year-old daughter Shura) remains inexplicable to me - Wevill seemed more resilient psychologically than Plath, but I can't figure out why she did what she did. That she was losing her looks seems to be Middlbrook's triggering event. Hughes' was predictably losing interest, and was sleeping around, but he did not seem to be making a break with Wevill. The horror of this is indescribable and it does make Ted Hughes' story fit for a Greek tragedy (so everybody says). But Hughes' libido marched on. He married Carol Orchard - a beautiful, young (of course) non-literary type who did the farm work on his cattle ranch (Hughes had returned to the country) while he carried on in the World of Literature with a couple of other women publicly. His wife apparently didn't mind - Middlebrook doesn't address this at all, beyond making a defense of Hughes' deep psychic need for "the hunt" - which she presents as something fierce and noble. I see it as the male biological urge for a harem manifested in a guy with the looks and cultural clout to get what he wants. Which is to say Ted Hughes' extramarital sex life was about as profound as a heavy metal drummer's. Quoting Robert Graves' White Goddess doesn't change this.

Two of these affairs are explored in some detail. First was press agent Jill Barber, whom he met on an Australian junket - after seeing his handsome mug on a brochure, she'd told a colleague she'd "bed Hughes before the festival was over." Assia Wevill did much the same thing (she put on "war paint" when first meeting him). Poor Ted, always getting gobbled by lady sharks! Barber dropped him when she got "broody" and Hughes wouldn't commit. Next was Emma Tennant, a writer, who, as Middlebrook reports, thought Hughes was a monster for his treatment of Plath, but who convinced herself that this was "the Bluebeard syndrome" - a need to "become involved with a man known for his terrifying and unacceptable treatment" of women. Uh huh. Sure. I love the word "unacceptable" in these contexts. Once again, Ted Hughes became another notch on a lipstick case, with Tennant ungraciously (but not unjustifiably) noting "I think he was a very over-excitable person....It was part of his carry-on. He fancied himself." (p. 252).

What his wife was doing, or his two children, during these times, Middlebrook doesn't say. Hughes had enough money for nannies and staff and fancy schools, and Carol Orchard seems to have been around, so I guess the kids were alright. The book dawdles off with a lot off attempts to secure Hughes' legacy - all those gazillions of poems, children's books, oratorios, prefaces and forwards, Shakespeare renderings, BBC broadcasts, and how "Birthday Letters" was a culmination and release of all his Sylvia Plath demons (or angels, or whatever). He also spent a lot of time editing Plath's journals, correspondence, and unpublished work. Middlebrook assures us this was difficult for Hughes, but he was well compensated - Plath's work is how he bankrolled himself - the Plath stuff is worth a fortune, and Hughes published it - shrewdly so - and died a wealthy poet. That doesn't happen very often!

His acceptance of the Laureateship was such a surprise - surely not Ted "Crow" Hughes! Hughes only got the job because Larkin turned it down; Poet Laureate is a ridiculous job but Hughes was apparently beyond ridicule by 1984. So much for hunting rabbits with a ferret in the Calder Valley. Was it the final act of self-betrayal? The wildman putting on a tie? Which is perhaps why his brother Gerald - just as handsome, apparently, and even more the wildman of the moors - exercised such an influence on Ted. Well into middle age, Ted was trying to get his older (by ten years) brother to move back to England and, apparently, live in some family compound. Gerald would have nothing of it, and remained in Australia dealing in rare animal pelts and whatnot, a true wildman living free. I think it possible Hughes wanted to tame his brother, then his own life wouldn't be the well-compensated compromise it became. And yet, as for Hughes' actual Laureateship, Middlebrook changed my mind - he was good at it, and, to my surprise, apparently very sincere and enthusiastic about the whole thing. He believed in royalty - kind of like T. S. Eliot without the Anglicanism - which tied into his Precambrian views of Man and England. To my delight he became "a sort of 'spiritual adviser'" to the Prince of Wales - isn't this a wonderful thing to know? I only wish Middlebrook had expanded on this some. He gushed, as I suppose I would, over the Queen and her Mum.

***

Middlebrook's prose is uneven. She'll be quite lucid and engaging when reporting the facts, but when she veer off into analysis - literary or psychological - she gets vaporous or banal. I had a tendency to just blip over these bits. For instance, there is an extended metaphor of that famous Escher etching of the two hands drawing each other - you know the one, some kid has it on her wall here and there in every dorm in America. Middlebrook makes some sort of conscious-unconscious point with it, which, although blipped over, kept turning up:

"Nonetheless, during her year at Smith, while the upper hand was fidgeting with names for characters, possible literary models, and possible markets for Falcon Yard, the lower hand finally set to work. It would have nothing to do with Falcon Yard. Instead, it began limning verbal portraits of Plath's colleagues at Smith...." (p. 122)

Those hands "limning verbal portraits" struck me as creaky Ego-Id stuff in disguise. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, things got even worse:

"Sylvia Plath was more productive than ever before in her life, the negative circuit of her creative energy fine-tuned and running at maximum efficiency..." (p. 186)

Beyond the fact this is pretty much a cliché to begin with, what makes it worse is that it is a botched cliché: you can't fine tune a circuit, and circuits do not "run" at maximum efficiency or otherwise (running implying moving parts). For somebody of Middlebrook's obvious talents, this is just napping at the keyboard.

Yeah, but I couldn't put this book down. I'll probably even read her Anne Sexton bio., though I don't want to.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book, a biography of the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is like watching two masterful painters working side by side, Gaugain and Van Gogh, or Renoir and Monet--though probably more like the former, considering the volatility of both partners. Diane Middlebrook was a marvelous biographer, her Sexton biography was superb, and now, Her Husband--the story of the marriage of two of the most iconic poets of their times. The book focuses on the creative cauldron which was the marriage, the way in which the personal supported/affected the writing.

So many things I didn't know, so many things that upend the old canard that Hughes "killed" Plath in some way or another. The two of them had an incredibly intimate, intense relationship in their work, romantic attachment and family dynamics. The parallels between the works and the lives so mutually informative--all that stuff the New Criticism left out (a school which held sway when I was a student, when you were supposed to treat the text alone, and view the creators' lives as off-limits, unknowable, in a way irrelevant. Which is fine if you don't or can't know, like with Homer, but you miss so much --the generative matrix, the connective tissue, which brings the work into a much sharper focus, leaving us with a far more dimensional experience of their work.

As a writer interested in character (I'm currently writing about poets), something I found fascinating was how much the two were obsessed with the notion of the writer's persona (as opposed to the person who writes.) "Both of us are slow," writes Plath at 25, thinking of their future family. "Late maturers, and must get our writing personae established well before our personalities are challenged by new arrivals."

"The Offers" is the central poem in Hughes' work of self-mythologizing," says Middlebrook. "Hughes provided himself with a mythical childhood, much in the manner of Wordsworth, setting forth an account of the growth of the poet's mind." "… And marriage forced a man into the underground of his own darkness. In 'The Offers,' he is stepping naked back into the world, no longer in the form of a man, but as a persona."

The self-conscious creation of a persona is not something every, or even most, writers attend to--but the ones who do remain the most fascinating. In Hughes's mythological universe, the poem comes from the place of wildness in civilized man, in his animal nature, so the persona is the poet is as bard, as anthropological shaman, a theme that's also in Yeats, Eliot, Robert Graves (a huge influence on Hughes, the White Goddess etc.), and DH Lawrence--who had such a profound influence on the Nin/Miller/Durrell group.

The portrait of Plath is incredibly evocative. I really see her-- always on the move, forward, vulnerable and vehement. Hands always actively interlacing, foot swinging. "Her most striking characteristic," says Middlebrook, "was her physical vitality." She was also remarkably unaware of others' disapproval. "A decidedly unrelaxing person to be around." "Her mythological persona--always Persephone, Queen of the Underworld."

What an intense, creative life they had, working side by side, reading things out loud, often writing about the same event, serving as one another's Muse. They each saw the other as a figure of myth--living on archetypal levels. Anything so intense was bound to explode sooner or later. Her fear of abandonment was very strong, one can see that in her work, and Middlebrook points out that Ariadne figures prominently in her personal mythology, that the creative self has to be abandoned by the mundane to be picked up by the divine--"a founding myth for Plath."

Surprisingly, there was a strong thread of occultism in their relationship, mostly coming from Ted--he read Tarot, and they hypnotized one another. The shamanistic played a huge part in their both their lives and work. This reminded me a lot of the poet James Merrill and his explorations with Ouija.

A great quote on whether or not Plath's poems were feminist really is more about the nature of poetry. THey weren't, states Middlebrook, "promoting a political position. They only do what poetry can do: track a significant emotion along pathways of associations, capturing the spoor in images." And this brilliant biography does the same.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The audiobook version of Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - A Marriage is free if you are an Audible Plus member. My advice? Grab it and download it--the freebies change.

First I read The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and then immediately followed with this, an excellent biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook. It covers the lives of both Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes. Pay attention to the title—the choice of words is significant. It is not his wife but instead her husband! What does that say to you?! Who is the one of greater importance? Plath! Who is the one grabbing possession? For me, this is Hughes! The emphasis is subtle, not brashly shoved in one’s face. The reader is free to analyze the facts and draw their own conclusions.

Most importantly, the book presents the pros and cons in a balanced, fair manner. It shows the strengths and weaknesses of both Hughes and Plath. It is comprehensive and well researched. In depth study and thoughtful analyses lie behind what is written here. It provides all the details you need to know to understand the couple’s relationship. Nevertheless, I am glad to have read both Plath’s “novel ” The Bell Jar and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath first, before reading this. When the author comments upon them you have the ability to judge if what she says is in your opinion valid. The author does a magnificent job of explaining, interpreting, analyzing and comparing Plath’s and Hughes’ poems. This is no easy task and I highly value and appreciate her insights.

Plath and Hughes communicated to each other via their poems. They use the same images. They speak via shared metaphors. To understand the messages conveyed it is necessary to know all their poems backwards and forwards. It is essential to know what instigated each poem, the symbols played with, the metaphors shared and how one poem grew from another. I tried listening to some of the poems—I was stumped! Sure, I had some ideas, but I understood not half of what was there. The author’s explanations make sense to me; they open up a whole other world of meaning. She does not explain every poem, this not being the point of the book. To comprehend what has happened in the couple’s life one must delve into the language of the poems as well as explicit events.

The lives of Plath and Hughes arouse so many questions. Why did Plath commit suicide? Why did Ted destroy Sylvia’s last journal and how did another journal simply get “lost”? What prompted Ted to rearrange, remove and add poems to Sylvia’s carefully planned opus, Ariel? All of these questions are, in my view, satisfactorily answered. You get enough information so you can draw your own conclusions.

To understand Ted and Sylvia’s relationship one must understand each as separate individuals, their family relationships, their background, education and personality traits alone and together. One learns much about Ted by observing the events of his life after Sylvia’s suicide. His entire life is covered in detail. Since Sylvia had no will and although separated they were still legally married, Ted became Sylvia’s legal heir. The management of her estate lay in his hands. We learn of his six-year-long relationship with Assia Gitmann Wevill and her suicide with their daughter lying beside her. Ted’s marriage to Carol Orchard and the extramarital relationships that followed are covered too, as well as Ted’s acceptance in 1984 of the UK poet laureate, his fame and how he set up not only Plath’s but also his own estate for future generations. In 1998 he died.

Personally, I don’t blame Ted for Sylvia’s death, but neither do I like him. In my mind he is a mooch, a leech. His construed philosophizing, based on so-called astrological, mystical and supernatural beliefs, is pure sophistry. His self-aggrandizement annoys me. I believe he was plagued by guilt. To get a grip on him one must look at his whole life, as the author does. The author covers both the life of Plath and Hughes in a clear, informative and balanced fashion. The stream of vitriol above is mine, not the author’s!

Bernadette Dunne narrates the audiobook very well. I reduced the speed to 90%, and then I was pleased. The words are clearly spoken and not hard to follow. French is well spoken. The differences between English and American accents are not exaggerated. Four stars for the narration. As the years pass, Dunne’s narrations get better and better.

I doubt I will pick up the mammoth tome now out on the market--Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. I am satisfied with what I have read. I can mention that Ariel is available on YouTube. I find listening to poetry difficult; I need to be able to frequently stop to grasp the essence of the lines.


*****************

*Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - A Marriage 4 stars by Diane Wood Middlebrook
*The Bell Jar 3 stars by Sylvia Plath
*The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 3 stars by Sylvia Plath

*Ariel TBR by Sylvia Plath
*Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath TBR by Heather Clark
*Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton by Gail Crowther TBR

[Katie Marquette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Turns out Ted Hughes was a jerk and Sylvia was the real genius. I don't think anyone's surprised.

** 2015 Update **

This was a snarky review - I know why I wrote it at the time, but I no longer really believe this. I am currently immersed in an excellent Hughes biography. I have also read quite a bit of his poetry over the past few years and come to appreciate his own unique voice. Hughes, like Plath, was a poetic genius. While their marriage was imperfect - and it is all too easy to play the blame game - I don't think either of them could have written what they did without the influence, support, and criticism of the other. Hughes was a lady's man his whole life, seemingly incapable of devoting himself to one woman. This does not, however, make him a monster. It also doesn't mean he wanted Sylvia Plath dead. He was the first person who read the Ariel poems - and the first to acknowledge their power. He worked tirelessly to make sure the world read her work and declared her on par with Emily Dickinson and other greats of the past. He believed in myth, in tragedy, and in fate. He mourned Sylvia's death his whole life. Feminists who bombast Ted and blame him for Sylvia's suicide are being overly simplistic and engaging in dangerous black and white thinking.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first began reading Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband, I was disappointed.

"This is all the stuff I already know," I thought. "St. Botolph's...black marauder...pushy American girl...I've read this all before. Where's the new stuff?"

Plath fans like myself, who've read every biography and scrutinized every poem, need to hang in there for a bit. It takes a while to tap the riches in this book, but once you hit pay dirt, you'll be buried in it. You can expect nothing less from Diane Middlebrook's exhaustive research and crisp, yet sensitive writing.

The book is essentially a biography of Ted Hughes, but it is a biography of Hughes in relation to Plath -- possibly the only kind of biography that could ever be written about Ted Hughes.

Middlebrook takes what has been said over and over about Hughes and Plath -- that they were larger-than-life, highly charismatic, very intense people -- and digs deep with research and literary analysis. The result is two fully-fleshed mythical figures, with the history of -- and reasons for -- the shaping of their mythic status.

Speaking of the literary analysis, it is incredibly detailed, dissected to a dizzying extent. Middlebrook is quite a scholar, and makes bold connections between various Plath and Hughes poems (some of which were written on opposite sides of the same piece of paper -- a practice Middlebrook calls Plath & Hughes's "hand-to-hand combat"). The poems take on squirming new life in the illumination Middlebrook provides.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were complex, inscrutable people. They believed their relationship was fated, and that indeed seems to have been the case. They goaded each other to produce writing that was better and more unique than anything else being written at the time. The destruction of their marriage was the catalyst for Plath's final poems, the ones that would guarantee her immortality.

It's hard to know how to feel about Ted Hughes. I have a lot more interest in, and respect for, him after reading this book. (See my 2008 review of Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev's A Lover of Unreason to see what I think of Hughes now.) One thing is certain -- he is the only man who could have endured life in the shadow of Sylvia Plath. A hunter, a creator of myths, only his questing, questioning nature could have been strong enough to stand up to all Plath threw at him, in life and in death.

[Χριστίνα · Rating 3 out of 5]

Την Πλαθ την αγαπώ και έχω διαβάσει αρκετά βιβλία για τη ζωή και το έργο της. Δυστυχώς, το συγκεκριμένο δε μου άρεσε, είχε πολλές περιττές κατά τη γνώμη μου λεπτομέρειες και ένα λόγο κάπως υπερβολικό και δήθεν για τα γούστα μου. Ωστόσο μου "ξύπνησε" το θαυμασμό μου για την Πλαθ και με έκανε να θέλω να ξαναδιαβασω και δικό της σύντομα!

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had some difficulty in choosing which shelf to put this on: biography, fiction or fantasy. I get a bit tired of ever being the nay-sayer, but really, what's the point of anything but complete honesty?

This book is a mess. It's a shambling, mishmash, hodgepodge collection of random thoughts, pulled together by a Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes groupie who-wasn't-there-when-it-happened-but-writes-about-them-like-she-was-the-family-confidante. I hate that.

Middlebrook rehashes all the old Plath-Hughes nuggets without adding anything to the body of work that has been covered, exhaustively, by other biographers. In fact, she probably sets the Plath-Hughes academy back by a decade with some unique (read: kooky or comical) interpretations of the poems. Scholars, and fans, may well be scratching their heads for years wondering about some of these parsed mis-directions on love and marriage.

What is most striking is that Middlebrook seems to be writing an apologia for Ted Hughes -- a little bit of irony coming from a feminist professor. Not that feminists should champion women's causes only, but that Hughes was probably one of the least deserving of such a defence of character, even self-admittedly so, if one knows the Hughes canon.

So.

It's a mess. Weak literary analysis aside, she fails to provide the road map that she intended to write when she started this book.

I don't think you should go in with the notion you want to find out who's right," says Middlebrook, "especially if you're thinking about marriage splits. That's not what a biographer should do. The biographer should ask, 'what was going on? Who was bringing what to the table at that moment?', knowing that marriages are dynamic relationships, knowing that something can grow up inside either of the partners that wasn't a factor when they made their commitment. ... "So that's what I wanted to know: what was their marriage like, what was going on? I would say neither was sinned against or sinning. Or that both were. But I think it's better to look at it in a binary sense: who was alive, who was dead.

Despite her denial, Middlebrook made up her mind long before she ever came to the page, on who was right and who was wrong in this tragic marriage. She gives her hand away in the same interview in which she defends herself:

Then I discovered that what I really wanted to do was talk about the marriage's long life in Hughes's imagination. So the book falls into two parts: when Plath is alive, and after her death. I was interested in how he struggled with the legacy of her suicide and of her work, and how he really – this is quite striking – continued to value her work, though her death was such a compromising and emotionally horrible thing for him.".[The Telegraph, 14 June 2004]

She writes about the marriage that had "its long life in Hughes's imagination" in such a way that beatifies the already-anointed, and in a less-than charming, lopsided fashion ends up blaming Plath for the weight she put on Hughes' life and imagination. A study in impartiality, if ever there was one. (!)

Apart from the undeserved reverence she casts on our hero, the writing itself is un-even at best. She writes lovely, lucid moments for a paragraph or two, and just when one thinks she is getting somewhere with the story, she veers off into the traffic, and plays wantonly with the reader's emotions. It's like following a drunken guest's monologue at a party: some of it is interesting, some of it is even brilliant, but when she starts smashing the crystal you ask her to leave because there's only so much madness that should be supported between friends.

[Anita Dalton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not what I thought it was going to be. When the title involves the word "marriage" I expect a little more of actual information about the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Instead of actual events from their marriage, we get lots of literary analyses of how their poetry echoed and reacted to each other.

That's all well and good but this book leaves out huge amounts of actual details from the writers' lives. Even the discussion of the poetry was shallow because there was a wealth of work that Hughes and Plath completed during their marriage that even I as an amateur Plath reader know of and found the omission of... interesting.

There is so much information about Plath and Hughes' actual life together that would have been nice to include in a book ostensibly about their marriage.

It's not a bad book but it's not great either. I am largely meh about it, sadly.

[Robin J · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you like talented awful people, this book is for you. Hughes destroys his late wife's novel-in-progress and last journals and claims that it's for the children. He leaves her manuscripts lying around the house to be stolen by friends and acquaintances then claims he is the only one who can edit her work because he cares. Ugh. The two were obviously a difficult pair but what ultimately drove them apart is Hughes' inability to keep it in his pants. In fact, all Hughes's marriages failed because of his obsession with his penis--except one. Yes, he finally found a woman with mental issues so intense that she lacked the self-esteem necessary to stand up to a husband who not only cheated, but did so publicly. And throughout this entire mess, Middlebrook attempts to see Hughes' side and celebrate the few non-douchy things that he does in his long narcissistic existence. Ugh.

[JLucasey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plath’s story is really difficult to tell. Plath as she relates to Hughes and vice versa and is an even more mind-boggling tale because they were both such strange people. But I found this book to be pretty illuminating, even if it tends to recycle information that a lot of people already know about this notorious literary couple. Its title isn’t very apt—it did a really good job of exploring how Plath and Hughes grew together as emerging writers before their symbiotic relationship’s infamous detonation, but doesn’t necessarily add to what any person interested in the pair probably already knows about them as a married couple.

My fascination with Plath waxes and wanes, but is nonetheless forever ongoing. I’ll never stop wanting to know more about her. Her poetry has been something like a mainstay in my life since early adolescence (not necessarily comforting, but purely essential), and I admit that I still find myself just as shocked and dismayed by Plath’s untimely end as I was when I first began probing into her life. And in critiquing Hughes, I don’t want to run the risk of falling into that mortifyingly insistent stereotype on college campuses and in pop culture which misconstrues Plath as a feminist martyr and typecasts her audience as…well…I don’t even precisely know what. That’s its own problem and something that just scrambles my brain with a million contradictions.

At the end of the day it’s obvious that Hughes did not kill Sylvia Plath. But his infidelity dropped her off a precipice of no return. Whatever sudden chemical break Plath had in February 1963 was not necessarily caused by Hughes, but was still absolutely compounded and worsened by the close memory of his very sudden betrayal. And when I contemplate Assia Wevill’s suicide in 1969, I don’t feel capable of even the most rudimentary form of sympathy for Hughes.

Yet I don’t think he was a monster. I see no rational reason to detest or hate him. As close as I feel to her through her writing, I still didn’t know Plath personally. I don’t condone people who go so far as to scratch out the “Hughes” part of Plath’s name on her tombstone—let her rest! But man, he just really sucked. He let Plath down in what was, for her, the most devastating way possible. Even after reading Middlebrook’s mildly apologetic account of Hughes’ “side of the story,” I still really dislike him. I found his reasoning for his desertion of Plath to be downright pathetic. I don’t understand how he really thought he could frame his adultery and desertion in the context of this wildly esoteric poetic tradition of animal instinct that he followed, or as a continuation of his pursuit of the pre-historic “White Goddess” à la Robert Graves. What a load of pretentious fucking hogwash. The basic kernel of truth is that Hughes was no longer sexually attracted to Plath or intellectually stimulated by her after she became a mother, and just couldn’t keep it in his pants when he met Assia Wevill. Whatever suffocation he felt under a marriage with the infamously jealous Plath was resolved in the most infantile and impulsive way imaginable.

I don’t know how successfully this book explored Hughes’ reaction to and interpretation of Plath’s suicide. The way he handled her papers is extremely maddening and borderline enraging for people who value ALL of what Plath was able to produce in her short lifetime as an integral part of her own comprehensive literary myth and tradition. Two missing journals — one lost as a result of Hughes’ hapless disorganization and another deliberately burned by him in order to “protect his children” — is no easily forgivable offense. But I digress. I appreciate that Middlebrook explored Ted Hughes’ personal management of Plath’s death almost purely through his poetry, especially in regards to Birthday Letters, which I read before I had a deeper understanding of the stories and legends behind them. However, something still felt missing. I think I’m just used to the fact that so much information about Plath — almost every emotional and psychological layer of her life, in fact — is made transparent by the publication of her letters, journals, poetry, stories, and artwork. Such is not necessarily the case with Hughes, who will always be a bit more distantly opaque than Plath ever was/is to her audience.

He is almost just as elusive and seemingly unpredictable to me as he was before I read this. I honestly feel like I learned more about Plath than I did about Hughes. And I’m okay with that. But I will also say that their relationship as a whole does make a lot more sense to me now and I feel that this was likely Middlebrook’s overarching goal.

Overall, I feel that as puzzling and fascinating as their “psychic bond” was, so much of that literary legend and so many aspects of their story will always be overshadowed by their abruptly impulsive destruction of it all. The actual timeline of their dissolution is confoundingly short. Will forever be trying to make sense of it.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished re-reading this one; was perhaps very slightly less impressed on this go round, but I still believe Middlebrook to be an incredible biographer, and this particular text to be the shining star of the Plath/Hughes biographical warzone. If you're looking for the whole picture, you will be unfortunately let down; this is, as the title suggests, a portrait of the Plath/Hughes marriage, and so we get very little of their earlier history, and the last several chapters are concerned with Hughes after Sylvia's death--who he fucked, what he wrote, when he got sad, how Birthday Letters came about. Like me, you may be surprised to be hit with Sylvia's death so soon--I guess I have this wonderful, magical-thinking tendency to believe that perhaps if I wish hard enough, the outcome of a biography will be different as I work my way through it. But alas, the same sad occurrences transpired, and I was left heartbroken yet again (I just need to stop reading biographies of the young-dead; I was depressed after Flannery died, and then again when I re-read Middlebrook's Sexton biography a couple months ago).

My one quandary with this text is the same one I had with Middlebrook's bio on Anne Sexton; in both cases, Middlebrook relies a bit too uncritically on the poems to illuminate 'themes' she finds self-evident in the biographies. This was actually a bit less problematic with Anne, because at least then, it was *her* writing that was 'illuminative.' Middlebrook uses Birthday Letters here at times to 'reveal' the experiences of the Plath/Hughes union, which I suppose, Bday Letters in fact sets out to do--but I find that book of poetry to be almost unethical in a perhaps too personally-invested way. It truly troubles me that Hughes uses his final volume to 'correct' Plath's biographical and (more frightening) poetic legacy; the woman can't speak back to any of it, and so when, for example, he revises her poem "The Rabbit Catcher" to suggest that, instead of an invasive male violence inflicted on nature, the real problem is Plath's poetic rage--I can hardly articulate well at this point, because it enrages me. We all want forgiveness, and Hughes certainly had his share of hardships from the Plath-camp; but I still find it incredibly insidious that he's revised her narratives in an appropriative and somewhat violent way. So Middlebrook's reliance on that text at moments in this bio likewise frightens me, but only on principle.

Largely, the reason this is so great an example of biography is that Middlebrook really manages to traverse the landmines of this particularly literary iconography in a mostly fair and powerful way. Both Plath and Hughes emerge as sometimes good, sometimes horrible, but always human figures. Middlebrook is also a really great, engaging writer, so you'll find yourself speeding through this in a way that some of the drier biographies (I'm looking at you, Anne Stevenson) simply can't compel you to do.

Even if you're not all that interested in this love affair, this is, bottom line, just a really wonderful biography. Highly recommended, but particularly if you're seeking a 'good' one on Plath and Hughes. Now I just need to finally crack into Malcom's The Silent Woman and Rose's The Haunting of SP.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the morning of Plath's suicide, she poured cups of milk and arranged helpings of bread, then carried the food up a flight of stairs to her children's room. They were around the ages of 3 and 1. She set it within reach of their beds, and pulled their window wide open. Then she closed the door to the room and sealed it all around with masking tape. On a torn piece of shelf paper, she printed a note giving the telephone number of their doctor--using two different pens: it seems she had to hunt for the telephone number. Then she taped the note to the pram standing in the room next to where the children lay asleep. Her last written words concerned her children's safety. (I have to say, committing suicide with your little children upstairs leaves me a bit cold.)

Then she returned downstairs to the kitchen and blocked the windowsills and entry door with towels and clothing, before pulling down the oven door and kneeling deep into the gas. Her last action on her own behalf was to fold a little cloth and place it under her cheek, for comfort while she drew her last breaths.

A nurse was due to arrive in the morning to help with the children. I have heard people say they think Sylvia hoped for a rescue. The nurse needed a workman to help opening the door. The evidence indicates she had every intention of killing herself.

Ted Hughes's next lover--Assia Wevill--also killed herself. She also killed her little girl fathered by Ted Hughes. They took pills in a drink and Assia turned on the gas.

Then the mother of Ted Hughes died suddenly after learning of Assia and her daughter Shura dying by suicide.

Ted Hughes is supposed to have destroyed Plath's journals. He claims he did not want to have the children read them. Still, no excuse.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Well-researched, we’ll-written, objective, and as good as Middlebrook’s biography of Sexton.

It’s been strange delving so deeply into Sylvia Plath’s short life over the years. It sometimes seems like I know more about her than any other writer, though I have no special connection to her work. And this iterative examination of her life and work and marriage shows no sign of coming to end.

I first read the Bell Jar, which of course stays with you. Then I read the Sexton biography, in which Plath figures prominently. Then I read the massive new biography of Plath, the Red Planet. Now I’ve read this dual biography. Next I’m sure I’ll tackle her lengthy journals. Then perhaps I’ll read the Bates biography of Hughes. And of course, I’ve read some more of Plath’s poems and Hughes’s Birthday Letters and translations.

I think at this point I’m just curious to see what I can learn about how literary history works. How different are these approaches to Plath from one another? How has the mythology of Plath changed over time? Am I getting closer or farther to Plath as I read new books about her?

[Janellyn51 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always been somehow more intrigued by Ted Hughes than Plath herself. I was truly saddened to see recently that thier son Nicholas comitted suicide. The Plath/Hughes thing is becoming something akin to the Kennedy curse of Poets....I don't like it. It's pretty horrifying to think of all the death and destruction Hughes purportedly caused with his infidelites....but I haven't got much to say for someone who sticks her head in an oven without head to the emotional baggage her children will have to carry through thier lives...Was that better than what the other woman did? He certainly was handsome. I'm reasonably certain that if I'd ever encountered him, I'd be equally smitten, but more inclined to have killed him than myself.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just can't stay away!

[Ρένα Λούνα · Rating 3 out of 5]

Πρόκειται για μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα και αναλυτική έρευνα για τη σχέση της Πλαθ και του Χιούζ.
Το έργο κάπως παραγκωνίζει την Άσσια - είναι σαφές πως δεν είναι δικιά της ιστορία, αλλά είναι σημαντικό πρόσωπο της ιστορίας. Εφόσον δηλαδή αφιερώνονται κεφάλαια στο τέλος, όπου γίνεται λεπτομερής ανάλυση στην ποίηση και στις επιτυχίες του Χιούζ, ίσως να είχε νόημα να σταθεί κανείς στην αυτοκτονία της Άσσιας και Σούρα σχετικά με τις αντιδράσεις του Χιούζ αλλά και της λογοτεχνικής κοινωνίας. Επίσης, η όποια σχέση είχε η Πλαθ με την Άσσια δεν αναλύθηκε πουθενά πέρα από τη γνωστή φευγαλέα επιστολή της Άσσια.

Ωστόσο είχαν απροσδόκητο ενδιαφέρον οι συνδέσεις των αναλύσεων της ποίησης των Πλαθ και Χιούζ ανάλογα με τα γεγονότα που αντιμετώπιζαν, αλλά και η εσωτερική τους 'επικοινωνία' μέσα σε αυτά.

Η παρούσα έρευνα φαίνεται να ευθυγραμμίζεται με τη σκέψη πως η Άσσια επιχείρησε με έναν πολύ συνειδητό τρόπο να αποπλανήσει τον Χιούζ, κάτι στο οποίο άλλες βιογραφίες στέκονται απέναντι- σε αυτό που συμφωνούν όλες, είναι πως όταν η Σύλβια τον χαρακτήρισε "ερωτύλο" σε καμία περίπτωση δεν έπεφτε έξω. Γιατί να μένουμε τόσο 'αντικειμενικοί' ενώ υπογραμμίζουμε την αστάθεια της Πλαθ;

Φαίνεται πως αυτό το έργο φιλοδοξεί σε μια καθαρή, αντικειμενική ματιά, ωστόσο τα μάλλον το συγκεκριμένο εγχείρημα που έχει ως πηγές τα σύνηθες στοιχεία: τα ημερολόγια της Πλαθ, την αλληλογραφία της Πλαθ με την Ορέλια Πλαθ και τις φίλες της, φίλους του Χιούζ, γείτονες, γιατρούς και πρώην συντρόφους, μόνο αντικειμενικά στοιχεία δεν μπορούν να δώσουν.

[Sarah Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to begin? I have lived with the works of these two colossal poets since undergraduate college. I've never taken sides in the great Plath-Hughes divide, precisely because I equally value their poems.

This book came out quite a few years ago, and even though I admired the author's biography of the poet Anne Sexton, I was hesitant to pick it up. What changed my mind? Negative reviews complaining that it was more about the poetry they created with and about each other than the gossipy drama that surrounds their lives. That's exactly what I was looking for!

Middlebrook is a keen reader of poetry. Some critics complained that Hughes was rag-picking images and phrases from Plath's work in his last collection of poetry, Birthday Letters. Middlebrook shows they were influencing each other all along. Plath's "Sow" and "Mushrooms" are clear examples of what she got from Hughes--her husband.

Her Husband is the title of the book, and it does seem to be more about Hughes than Plath. But then he lived longer. There is a noticeable peculiarity. Like Elaine Feinstein, who wrote an excellent biography of Hughes, Middlebrook seems fascinated by the Yorkshire poet's sexual fascism. Both of these accomplished, professional women focus sharply on his animal sexual appetites and number of lovers; the very things that are suppose to repel feminists away from Hughes. Middlebrook actually catalogs every mention Plath makes of Hughes' strong smell!

Middlebrook is probably best writing about the Birthday Letters--poems Ted wrote to Sylvia for years after her death but did not publish until the end of his life. These poems tempt us to Hughes' "side." Because they are mature, reflective, even self-incriminating in a way that Plath never grew up to be.

Suddenly I read all this--
Your actual words, as they floated
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page-

I look up--as if to meet your voice
With all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then look back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story.

Spouses cheat. Marriages fall apart. But Plath and Hughes were the most productive and accomplished husband and wife partnership in English letters since Mary and Percy Shelley.

Middlebrook's rather massive achievement is so rich it begs a second or third reading. She writes: "You recognize what Hughes wants from you, the only thing the living can give to the magical dead: empathetic but pitiless attention."

[Maythee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Middlebrook offers a very different type of biography here. The story is told through the passionate yet tumultuous love relationship Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes had. I was really caught up in learning how they met, what their early marriage was like, and how they felt about writing in the process. For example, their writing rituals were really intricate and required a lot of negotiation in terms of their personal lives. Similarly, Middlebrook explains the background that motivated their various publications, which adds much more to appreciating the actual works and poems. Another added bonus is that we learn about their relationships with other writers. The literary circles these two ran in were equally interesting to the couple's love life.

In addition, Middlebrook paints a vivid picture of the kind of life women writers faced before second wave feminism. No doubt Plath had a lot of emotional issues of her own, but as you read from her journal entries much of her insecurities, self-doubts, and anxieties came from trying to compete in a male-dominated field. Similarly, while writing was her obsession, she was also a young woman trying to make sense of her sexuality, her identity, and her place in the world. Although non-fiction, this work very much reads like a good story.

[Michael Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating examination of a relationship, with immense empathy for all the damaged people involved. I thought Middlebrook's objectivity showed a great degree of compassion, and she seems to be up to some myth-busting as well. The downside, for me, seemed to be a somewhat superficial, even irrelevant, inclusion of lines of poetry; often, Middlebrook includes 2-3 line quotes from poems, and seems to think that they are self-explanatory in their commentary on the lives of Plath and Hughes. She rarely does any analytical work to show how the art reflects the life and temperament of the artist. While this is meant to be a biography of a marriage, and not a critical work, I am skeptical of the number of lines she quotes that left me scratching my head. That said, it seems an even-handed and deeply researched account.

[Sarah O'Toole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best book I've ever read about Sylvia Plath. Because the biographical detail is secondary to the quest to discover the ways in which Plath and Hughes evolved and created each other as poets, we are brought right into the creative process and journey through the inner life of their work. I didn't feel like I was called to judge them as people, I felt privileged to gain a vantage point on how their work emerged out of who they were and it inspired me to be more accepting of my own life and creative processes, and to find out what my own images and metaphors are. I am really looking forward to reading Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton.

[JoBerlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ich bin begeistert: Sehr gut recherchierte und exzellent geschriebene Biografie über Ted Hughes und Sylvia Path. Der englische Titel ("Her Husband") ist wesentlich besser und treffender.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the mythopoetic pantheon, Sylvia Plath is a key martyr, while Ted Hughes remains forever in her shadow. I recently read my first book of Hughes's poetry, Crow, and the whole time I couldn't help but compare the poems to Plath's, who I knew much better. It's really fascinating how things shake out in the end, because Hughes lived about twice as long as Plath, but he made such a weaker impact. Or rather, he made an outsized impact on her life, being a major cause of the instability which ended it.

Of course, everything in their relationship centers around this one biographical fact: Plath's death. It's the eye of the hurricane which everything inevitably highlights. That horrible image of Plath with her head in the oven is repeated over and over in our consciousness. Ask anyone about Plath, and if they know she's a poet, they also know she died in that way, in that position, kneeling with her head in an appliance. Perhaps it's unfair, but Hughes worked so hard to create a mythos about Plath. In his defense, he tried very hard to make sure she became popular, speaking only well of her after her death. But such a tactic was a double-edged sword, as he did so for monetary gain, being still legally her husband and inheriting all the profits. His censorship also reached from his own throat into Plath's journals, many of which he felt deeply uncomfortable sharing with the world. Of course, us merciless readers thirsty for drama don't empathize very much with this choice. We think he's suppressing the truth, that he's not man enough to face up to the results of his own actions; but put yourself in his place: poets are not very well-liked today, mostly written off as esoteric and pretentious. What little fame they get, they hold on to with a death grip. He, pre-social media, didn't like the idea of his internal organs (or, as boring people call them, his past relationships) being on full display. I think the question we should be asking, rather than why did he suppress them, is why are we so suspicious of his wish for privacy?

I think this book balanced so many things so delicately and artfully that it should be commended. Diane Middlebrook's writing style, pacing, and emotional/intellectual intelligence all shine through. Even if I hated poetry and never had heard of these poets, this would have been an engrossing read. Things start off spicy enough, with some details of their sex life. Such a start didn't feel salacious, however, because Middlebrook managed to weave that into the themes of their poetry, highlighting how that initial fire fueled their explosion into the literary world. Hughes thought they were destined to marry, and then destined to be famous, and he somewhat made sure of that by abandoning Plath. Easily the worst thing he did to her, he may have done so because worse things may have happened inside of him. I don't know what he was thinking, because it certainly was selfish and thoughtless. He claimed he had feelings of being too comfortable, and such a statement is laughable to most people. Most of us strive so hard for comfort, almost never reaching it. But, especially for creative minds like theirs, they needed some level of discomfort to create great art. It was of course irresponsible for Hughes to leave her; they could have found discomfort in some other way. Too bad he wasn't creative enough to figure out a way to salvage their marriage and also get some new chaos in his life.

The sense that you get in this biography is how animalistic Hughes was, and how that both attracted Plath and led to the dissolution of their marriage. Hughes was always too pagan of a man, never weighed down by Christian morality, and, though that removed some inhibitions that Plath really loved, it also removed certain inhibitions like matrimonial chastity, i.e. not cheating. After her death and until his, Hughes tried to make sense of what really happened between them. It was an intense, brutal, beautiful 6 years. That's it, only 6 years they were together. But over the course of that time, especially by the end and after their separation, she made some of the most important poetry in English. All it took was all of her, ripped messily in half by his sudden departure. In a sense, Hughes "created" her artistically, which simultaneously destroyed her. She was already on her way to developing an amazing talent, but he artificially instigated her maturation, causing her to make "late work" at the young age of 30.

Of course, he was never able to reach her greatness. Everything he did would now be compared to her. He spent a large amount of his time writing plays and children's books, which was how he made most of his money, but I'm not really interested in those. No one really is. We're interested in how the two of them bounced off of each other creatively. The problem was that, at least while they were alive they were both improving in tandem, even while apart. But after her death, her oeuvre was closed along with her coffin lid. Her creative energy dissipated into the darkness. She will continue to inspire others, surely, but for the longest time all we had was what he allowed us to have. He gatekept what came out about her, never talked to biographers about her, and generally did whatever he thought was right.

Should we be mad at him? Should we pity Plath? Was their situation the logical conclusion of the ill-fated 1950s marital ideal? I think they were exceptional. Most people do not have the creative energies, competency, or ferocity that they did. Most people lie down, defeated. Most people get home after a long day of work and veg out until the weekend. On the weekend they don't really do anything interesting, just more activities to distract themselves from their own existence. By contrast, both of these writers really lived, intensely; they loved and hated and poured themselves into brand-new molds chiseled by their own hands. It's a terrifying and exhilarating thing to witness. Since I started this book, I've been wondering if their lives really were enviable or not. Sure, they had something very special, but their stars were both too bright and hot for them to last long. It's not inevitable that it would have ended the way it did, but you get the sense it would have gone wrong somehow.

Lastly, I do think Hughes is pitiable to some degree. His relationships after Plath (and even the one which caused their breakup) seem pretty sad in comparison. They never seem to fuse so totally in unison as Plath and Hughes did. Sure, they fought regularly and disagreed often, but creatively their energies accelerated each other. It's a rare thing to find a mind which sparks yours, and it might just be worth sparking it even if it burns you to the ground. I guess the question becomes: do you seek the comfort of easygoing predictability, or the excitement of a volcanic eruption? One always seems preferable when you're living through the other. Perhaps it's an unwinnable war, an unsolvable problem; or maybe the tension between the two is what makes relationships fun in the first place. Either way, Hughes will forever be remembered as Her Husband, if he even is remembered. And honestly, there's a lot worse ways to be remembered, such as being forgotten.

[Jan Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is engaging, thought-provoking, and at times, raw. An excellent companion to Mad Girl's Love Song; it tells the rest of the story. Required reading for any fan of Sylvia Plath.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If a book can stir as many charged emotions as this one did for me, the author must have done a fine job; Even though sometimes my expletives - mostly reserved for Ted Hughes, occasionally for Plath's British contemporaries and their ugly opinions about Plath - were admittedly aimed at the author's conflicting (to me) reasons for writing this biography.
Hughes was despicable in how he used women as his "White Goddess" for inspiration. Apparently, I feel very protective towards Plath.
3.5

[Layla Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read about Sylvia or Ted before and this was an eye opener. I could not put it down. Of course I have to say I feel on Sylvia's side in this thing.

[Rich · Rating 2 out of 5]

After more than 10 years on my shelf, I slogged thru it!! Now to Goodwill 4 U

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

My interest before picking up this book was definitely skewed toward Sylvia, knowing almost nothing about Ted Hughes. As a teenager I went through a phase of interest in which I read some of her best known poetry and The Bell Jar. (And dressed as an "acetylene virgin" for Halloween. Lord help me.) I probably would have preferred to read a straight biography of her, but my local library had this title available as an audiobook, and I enjoy listening to audiobooks while work in the studio, doing dishes, etc.

This ended up being a perfect pick for its relation to the themes I'm researching for my MFA this semester - power, control, and self-control. And specifically how those broad abstractions relate to sex and madness - with feminism, romantic relationships, and infidelity being subtopics of sex. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect couple to look at for these themes. I picked Plath of course for her well known descent into madness. But I had no idea how much the relationship between she and Hughes was explicitly about power - their ideas and ideals about manhood and womanhood.

There was much talk of a theory/poem referred to as The White Goddess, which I will be looking into next. It seems to relate to ideas which I am at least somewhat familiar with, due to their influence on Wicca and neo-paganism. The occult lineage makes sense, as Hughes was obsessed with astrology as well. Another important source to look at is D.H. Lawrence. It's shocking that I haven't read anything of his up to this point actually.

And then of course you have infidelity... Ted Hughes's life being full of it. The relationship he had with the mistress he left Plath for also has much to say about power ... and in general Hughes had some sort of theory about manhood and his own identity specifically as being about "the hunt" or a predator / prey relationship. He was a hunter and a fisherman (although he eventually gave up hunting) and engaged in these as a productive or safe way to channel his passions and instinct. But he also looked at his relationship to women as a hunting one, and this energy seemed tied to his creative energy. I also learned that he uses many animal references in his poetry. I'm intrigued to read some of these works, as a reference for my own use of animal imagery in sculpture.

Diane Middlebrook is an excellent biographer, detective, and literary interpreter. Occassionally I felt like she might be going out on a limb in her most specific interpretations of Hughes's most mysterious verse, but she always managed to make such air-tight arguments for her assertions, that I ended up believing her.

In the end, I ordered my own copy of this book, feeling it to be essential for my research.

[K.C. Bratt-Pfotenhauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will be honest; I went into this only knowing it was a biography about the Plath-Hughes marriage. I failed to notice "Her Husband" tacked onto the title before it arrived at my door. When I realized it would be more focused on Hughes rather than Plath, I was, initially, very angry. I don't like Ted Hughes very much at all. Ever since my first foray into Plath in high school, I have defended her and her craft and written off Ted Hughes as a cheating jerk, for lack of a better term. And after reading this book?

I still think he's a cheating jerk, but I know more about him and his life and his work now. And boy, do I know a lot about how the work of Hughes and Plath intersect. Middlebrook clearly is incredibly thorough in her work, but more attuned to poetic analysis rather than traditional biography (but as biography comes in myriad forms, that wasn't a thing I was particularly upset about.)

The main aspect of this biography I found most unsettling was how biased at times Middlebrook appeared in favor of Hughes and expounding upon his work and his creativity in favor of bypassing Plath's work and talent. And also, in regards to Hughes' extramarital affairs in his marriages: chalking them up to his animal magnetism or to male biology or dressing it up with explanations about his various muses and quotes about the White Goddess? Still doesn't excuse his actions. It really doesn't. And I really didn't like or appreciate Middlebrook for seemingly trying to normalize Hughes in that respect.

In spite of above, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it (albeit with an asterisk next to the blurb with the previous paragraph of this review attached.)

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course the movie about these two writer skews many of the "facts" illustrated in this riveting biography. What's not in contention, though, is the oneness with which they approach their art. One cannot read Hughes' poetry without detecting echoes of Plath. He was never without a woman--always securing one before the former realized she was being replaced. The complication of two intellectual artists who try their hand at domestic, procreative bliss. Too many bodies weigh down the boat. But, despite his foibles, the contention of this biographer is that "depression killed Plath." Each writer was highly productive--every day meant pages of journal entries, correspondence, short stories, criticism, and poems. Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" highly influence Hughes and his fellow literi of the time (London). D.H. Lawrence was a favorite of Plath's. H and P were steadfast in the idea of magic, unconsciousness, and imagination at the core of poetic fluidity--with realism at its core; the meat of imagination must engorge the center.