Loving Sylvia Plath A reclamation

This disquieting debut from Van Duyne, a writing professor at Stockton University, examines how Ted Hughes's physical and psychological abuse of his wife, Sylvia Plath, shaped her life, work, and legacy. Chronicling Hughes's violent outbursts, Van Duyne notes that he strangled Plath on their honeymoon in 1956 and hit her while she was pregnant in 1961 (she miscarried two days later). A particularly devastating chapter details the life of Assia Wevill, whose affair with Hughes provoked Plath to leave him. Hughes also abused Wevill, Van Duyne writes, suggesting he likely contributed to Wevill's decision in 1969 to gas herself and the four-year-old daughter she'd had with Hughes. Shedding light on how Hughes hid his misdeeds from public scrutiny, Van Duyne explains that he excised "poems about a violent marriage and disrupted love affair" from Plath's posthumous poetry collection, Ariel, and destroyed the unfinished manuscript for her second novel, which was reportedly "about the breakup of a marriage." Van Duyne argues that Hughes's subterfuge was abetted by male literary critics who interpreted Ariel as a "poetic death wish" while glossing over its "critique of marriage and motherhood," ensuring that Hughes "was excused of any responsibility" for Plath's death. An incriminating account exposing the depths of Hughes's cruelty, this is sure to reignite debate in literary circles. (July)

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 Van Duyne considers published and unpublished biographical sources; Plath's poems, especially the marriage poems that Hughes excised from Ariel; and feminist analytic philosophy to support her assertion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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.