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Sarah Anthony
posted 24 October 2006

A new biography of the poet Ted Hughes' lover Assia Wevill will add more fuel to the raging inferno of rumours that he destroyed the women in his life with his voracious philandering.

Elegant, sophisticated, thrice-married Assia Wevill hypnotised men with her exotic beauty and tantalising air of - as Hughes himself put it - 'erotic mystery'. At the time Wevill first met Hughes, his wife Sylvia Plath - a striking beauty herself - was looking after two small children and had metamorphosed from a glamorous, effervescent student into careworn, depressive housewife. The marriage between two of the greatest poets of the 20th Century had become stale with the tedium of childrearing and housekeeping. Although Hughes appreciated - and in Wevill's case would later come to insist on - domestic subservience, part of him felt suffocated by it, and the intensity of the chemistry he felt with Wevill was a breath of fresh air. What may initially have started as a temporary distraction from niggling marital tensions transmogrified into liaison of catastrophic consequences as Wevill's husband attempted suicide, Plath succeeded at her own second attempt, Wevill had an abortion, and eventually also killed herself and her second child by Hughes.

It transpires rather disturbingly that Hughes tried to mould his lover to the Stepford wife stereotype of the 1950s - one to which Plath had more than willingly conformed - by issuing a 'draft constitution' of household rules. This rather absurdly conceived list actually included a commandment not to lie in bed after 8am. Such sinister revelations seem to back up the numerous claims by feminist literary critics that Hughes was tyrannical towards women. Broodingly handsome in a rugged, Heathcliffian way, Hughes was certainly extremely attractive to them. Soon after meeting Plath, he was the inspiration for her 1956 poem 'Pursuit' in which a panther stalks its prey with relentless menace. In the poem, Plath appears to make a prophetic statement with the line 'one day I'll have my death of him'. Wevill herself likened Hughes to a 'butcher' and he radiated a dangerous, animal magnetism. Hughes' own exploration of the violence of nature in volumes such as Crow bears this out and suggests of a raging turbulence within his psyche.

Over the next seven years, Wevill seems gradually to have become almost possessed by the ghost of Plath, sleeping in her bed, using her personal belongings, becoming engrossed in her diaries, looking after her children, and eventually even killing herself in a similar manner. Though Wevill's affair with Hughes was only one of a number of catalysts for Plath's suicide at 30, she seemed to fit perfectly the stereotype of callous, man-eating vixen, and was evidently more of a scapegoat than Hughes later became. Plath was a manic depressive who had first attempted suicide at the age of 20, and Hughes wasn't exactly blameless, having taken active steps to initiate an affair with Wevill (his first letter to her read 'I have come to see you, despite all marriages'). These facts were conveniently ignored by Hughes's parents, friends and, rather predictably, by Hughes himself, who eventually failed to disguise his contempt for Wevill during a final meeting in Manchester. The relationship does not seem to have brought any real happiness to either party, whereas Hughes' marriage to Plath initially had this in abundance. Wevill's death - along with that of her daughter - was another futile waste of what the biography reveals to be a dignified, courageous and highly intelligent woman.