LOVING SYLVIA PLATH

A new look at a famed poet.

Van Duyne, a professor of writing, makes a thoughtful book debut with a revisionist take on “the life, death, and literary afterlife” of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). She contends that “selective editing and censorship” by Plath’s husband, poet Ted Hughes, and his sister Olwyn, resulted in a “thorough pathologizing of Plath’s creativity” by portraying her as obsessed with a “poetic death wish,” a conclusion repeated by critics such as Al Alvarez and George Steiner. Van Duyne considers published and unpublished biographical sources; Plath’s poems, especially the marriage poems that Hughes excised from Ariel; and feminist analytic philosophy to support her assertion that Plath suffered from, and was undermined by, Hughes’ abuse. As a survivor of intimate partner violence, Van Duyne is particularly sensitive to evidence of repeated instances of marital cruelty in Plath’s writing, and she cites studies connecting intimate partner violence and suicide. Rather than being “a stabilizing factor” in Plath’s life, Hughes was manipulative, brutish, and unfaithful, behavior he repeated in his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill. He sent the emotionally fragile Wevill “a ten-point list of directives” for what to wear and cook and how to speak, denigrating her appearance and her accent and reimagining her in his poems as a “monstrous mother.” In 1969, Wevill killed herself and their 4-year-old daughter, after which “Hughes began a campaign to obscure, and then erase, Wevill’s existence from memory.” Van Duyne is forthright about her love for Plath: “She is part of every single thing I’ve been and done,” she writes. Although Plath devotees have been characterized as “extremist, suicidally depressed, hysterical, angry or misandrist”—or just emotional teenagers—Van Duyne sees Plath as a continual inspiration. She surely conveys her admiration in this book.

A fresh melding of scholarly investigation and personal reflection.