Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily van Duyne

Written by Victoria Best

There’s a lot going on in Emily van Duyne’s intriguingly hybrid work on Sylvia Plath, a book that has its feet in scholarship and its head in the literary clouds of creative nonfiction. Its motivation is to provide nothing less than a ‘reclamation’ of Plath’s life and work, in the wake of letters to her therapist, Ruth Beuscher, becoming public property, letters in which Plath claimed she had suffered intimate partner violence at the hands of her husband, Ted Hughes. Van Duyne reads the outraged reaction of the press to this revelation as disingenuous, as if Plath’s accusations ‘were not only anomalous but brand-new.’ This shows a rather touching faith in British newspaper headlines to be anything other than clickbait, but van Duyne goes on to make a fine case for the persistent myth that Hughes was Sylvia’s stable ground, and that it was the poetry that killed her. Van Duyne’s sense that she was being ‘lied to’ in a world where ‘anything that is not a hard fact is discounted’, aligned with her own experience of abusive relationships and led to her to write this book, addressing ‘major life events [that] had been deliberately left out of [Plath’s] story’.

Loving Sylvia Plath does a good job of stripping away any lingering doubt that Ted Hughes controlled the narrative about Plath in ways that were undoubtedly ruthless, destroying her journals, editing her poems and mythologising her life. It’s equally clear that he was a man who had a problem with women and treated them poorly. The properly startling fact that came as news to me (fond of Plath but not deeply read in the secondary work around her), was that Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Hughes left Plath, also killed herself and their four-year-old daughter in 1969, six years after Plath’s suicide. To lose one wife that way might be unfortunate, but to lose two does seem to indicate a pattern. Hughes’ litigious frame of mind and his powerful reputation kept his hands relatively clean for the rest of his life, although there was the rumble of outrage from his male supporters about insufferable feminist attacks on his work, crowds of women protesting his work. In fact, attempts by scholars to find any evidence of these events have all failed, and the outrage seems to have little substance.

For me the book was at its strongest in the opening chapters. The introduction is a fine, lucid exposition of the gender rancour surrounding the appreciation of Plath, and this is followed by powerful biographical chapters on both Plath and Assia Wevill – whose reclamation I was in some ways more interested in than Plath’s. Plath seems to me to hold her own against Hughes these days as a brilliant poet deserving of her place in the pantheon of 20th century greats. Wevill’s life, however, was entirely unknown to me and a compound tragedy of all that was worst in the previous century in terms of anti-semitism and misogyny. The chapters that follow feel more like creative non-fiction, circling around and around the mythologising that took place after Plath’s death, the difficulties involved in writing biographically about Plath and Hughes, the censorship and the fandom, the poetry and its relationship to life. There’s repetition here and I wish van Deuyn would nail her answers to some of the deeply intriguing questions she asks (why IS it so hard to write about Plath for the women who admired her?). But there’s a ton of fascinating information too, and she forges along at a fast pace so the reader’s interest is always maintained.

Van Duyne is anxious to make a case for reading the poetry of Plath and Hughes as biographically revelatory, so references to partner violence in Plath’s work can’t be dismissed in the way male critics in the late 20th century wanted them to be – for instance she quotes Denis Donaghue writing in 1981 that: ‘The intensity of Plath’s poems is beyond dispute, but not the justice of their complaint.’ I can see why this kind of thing is infuriating. But even so, by the end of this book I felt that there was a justified case for reading Hughes’ poems as a measure of his imagination with regard to both Plath and Wevill, saying something significant about how he felt, how he viewed his relationships, how his love and hatred for these women found expression. But I remained uncomfortable reading Plath’s poetry and fiction as evidence for events that happened in her life and relationships. I say this as someone in no doubt that Hughes was abusive towards Plath, but I’d rather take the evidence for this from her plentiful letters and journals. If Plath had been a lesser poet, I might be more tempted to read her literally. I was surprised and a little disappointed, then, that we didn’t get to spend any time with the Beuscher letters and what they actually said. Given it was the key part of the book, the information about intimate partner violence felt scattered across all the chapters. I would have liked the disparate information to be drawn together and thoroughly dealt with in one place.

Ultimately, where I feel this book really succeeds is in its plea for Plath to be seen and respected as the complicated and contradictory woman that she was. This speaks to an ongoing unresolved issue, even in the 21st century, in which women are still shoehorned into one shape, one type or one stereotype. It speaks to the way that even love – perhaps especially love – requires women to be shorn of their awkward, heterogeneous aspects. I came away feeling that it was a fascinating study in both love and hatred, but that this fundamental root of the book was never considered with any distance. What is it to love an author? What is it to hate a person? But if I read this as creative nonfiction rather than scholarship, then its unresolved nature can be seen as part of its depth and charm.

Victoria is one of Shiny’s co-founders and is now an Editor at Large. Her blog is here.

See also Victoria’s review of Mad Girl’s Love Song by Andrew Wilson (which uses the same photo on the cover!)

Emily van Duyne, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (W.W. Norton & Co, 2024)
978-1324006978, 320pp., hardback.

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