Product Description

Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, at the outset of their brilliant careers. Plath's suicide six and a half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable, changed his life, his closest relationships, his standing in the literary world, and the style and substance of his verse. In this stunning new biography of their marriage, Diane Middlebrook presents a portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband haunted-and nourished-his entire life by the aftermath of his first marriage.

Drawing on a trove of newly available papers Middlebrook presents Hughes as a complicated, conflicted figure: sexually magnetic, fiercely ambitious, immensely caring, and shrewd in business. She argues that Plath's suicide, though it devastated Hughes and made him vulnerable to the savage attacks of Plath's growing readership, ultimately gave him his true subject-how marriages fail and how men fail in marriage.

Writing with the penetrating insight and lucid sympathy that informed her previous bestselling biographies, Middlebrook rises to the multiple challenges presented by this highly fraught, deeply controversial subject. Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer's art and craft.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #819342 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-13
• Released on: 2003-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
Dianne Middlebrook launches Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, appropriately, with the birth of the poets’ lives together. Through her retelling of the historic moment of their first meeting, Middlebrook sets the balanced, literate, and brutally honest tone that she maintains throughout the book. According to Middlebrook, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s first encounter was violent and almost mythic, punctuated with kisses and biting. In 112 days they were married. Together, as Middlebrook shows, they formed a unique literary bond. They remained aggressive intellectual and erotic partners. But, six years later, Hughes left Plath and their two children for another woman. She committed suicide shortly after, while Hughes would go on to a long and successful career as a poet and as Plath’s literary executor.

What Middlebrook brings to this story, outside of the almost voyeuristic details gleaned from letters, diaries, interviews, and past biographies, is a scholarly commitment to infuse the reading of Hughes and Plath’s marriage with a reading of their poetry and prose. In less capable hands, using literature to reconstruct biography can lead to an undisciplined avoidance of real historical research. But Middlebrook drafts the writings to bolster her understanding of the couple in sophisticated ways that link their private language to their public statements in published works (especially Hughes’ Birthday Letters). At the same time, Middlebrook remains deeply aware that Hughes and Plath worked to re-construct themselves through their writings, often with conflicting self-portraits, for posterity. She is comfortable letting their contradictions exist side by side.

Her Husband is wonderfully told; it is difficult to imagine how this narrative of the marriage could be surpassed. One only hopes that Middlebrook will have the stamina to amend her own work—if necessary—when Hughes’s most private papers are made public in 2023. --Patrick O’Kelley

From Publishers Weekly
Joining the recent spate of books about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, all of which concern the sources of their poetry and their dysfunctional marriage, Middlebrook's is sure to be the gold standard. Astutely reasoned, fluidly written and developed with psychological acuity, the work is a sympathetically balanced assessment of two lives that flamed brightly with the incandescent fire of creative genius. Accessing newly available materials in the Hughes archives at Emory University, Middlebrook (Anne Sexton) offers fresh evidence of Hughes's beliefs in shamanism, psychic telepathy and the predatory instinct, and she breaks new ground in tracing the couple's interactive creative relationship, suggesting that neither would have produced his or her best poetry without the other. She shows how Hughes's faith in mysticism not only led him to believe that his marriage to Plath was fated, but also acted as a counterweight, inspiring him to seek his muse in erotic entanglements with other women. She conjectures that Plath, too, needed erotic aggression to release her creative impulses, demonstrating the particulars of her struggle with the conflicting demands of motherhood. And she effectively demolishes Hughes as the demon who destroyed Plath, stating that during their marriage he displayed "a high level of tolerance toward what other people considered... antisocial, crazy... behavior"; she also writes that Plath's emotional breakdown was a recurrence of the clinical depression that occasioned her first attempt at suicide in 1953. In the end, the book is most valuable in interpreting Hughes's sources of poetic inspiration and emotional behavior, and in providing a balanced assessment of the legacy of a troubled marriage and the works of art it engendered.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Middlebrook, the author of a seminal biography of poet Anne Sexton, presents the most balanced, most literary and interpretatively astute, and best-written analysis yet of the saga of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. By mapping the attractive, aggressive, ambitious, and profoundly inspired poets' family histories, and delving deeply into their dynamic imaginations, personal mythologies, and galvanizing poetry, Middlebrook brings mystical yet rapacious Hughes and frenetic and determined Plath into crisp focus, brilliantly explicating each poet's incomparable gifts and tragic flaws. What remains elusive is Plath's little understood and fatal mental illness. Had that poison not lurked, Middlebrook cogently argues, temperamental differences would have eventually ended the "most mutually productive literary marriage in the twentieth century." But Hughes embarked on a flagrant affair with Assia Wevill, Plath killed herself, and so, too, did Assia, six years later, after murdering Hughes' and her daughter. Middlebrook illuminates many heretofore shadowy aspects of this much-told and persistently controversial tale (see Kate Moses' Wintering [BKL F 1 03] for the best fictionalization), but, as discerning as Middlebrook's deeply moving study is, it won't be the last word: a sealed trunk sits in the Hughes archive, destined to be opened in 2023. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The Myth they Created to Outlive Them Both
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 respsect for, him after reading this book. 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.

The Yin & The Yang Of A Creative, Destructive Pair - Superb!
Diane Middlebrook's book about the ill-fated marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is an extraordinary combination of biography and literary criticism. Rather than focusing on Plath's depression and subsequent suicide, the author offers a valuable, unsentimental analysis of both their work and the influence they had on each other's lives and creative processes.

She portrays Hughes, not as an egotistical, philandering husband who abandoned his wife and family, but as a man and a poet, struggling with his failed marriage. In fact, how marriages fail, and the men and women who fail in making their relationships work, are part of the book's central theme. Hughes' inspired and encouraged his wife's creativity, but he also contributed to the anguish which led to her suicide. Living with Sylvia Plath was not an easy task though. Her work, her life and her death profoundly changed Ted Hughes' perspective on his own life and work.

Plath, more than thirty years after her death, has evolved into an icon of martyred feminism and is revered by her passionate following. Many believe that her tragic suicide was a result of the overwhelming societal demands placed on a woman/wife/mother/artist at the midpoint of the last century. However, Sylvia Plath is, foremost, one of the most brilliant poets of that century, with her roles as daughter, wife and mother taking second place to her art. Her death was a tragedy, not a personal statement or rebellion. Her history of mental illness, and the barbaric treatment she received for the disease, is a known fact. Her pain was a violent presence in her life, especially during the last months. There was nothing passive, quiet or calculating about it. Plath was a victim of her demons, perhaps the Furies, who finally claimed her.

During his lifetime Hughes was very reluctant to disclose information about his turbulent relationship with his poet wife, especially about their break-up and her months alone with her two children during a terrible London winter. He explained his silence as wanting to protect his children. Finally, in 1998, "Birthday Letters" was published, a volume of verse-letters about his relationship with his wife. Weeks after publication Hughes died. In this volume, Hughes breaks his silence and responds to critics, scholars, and in a sense to Sylvia. This material provided literary scholars with the perspective they had lacked for so long. Hughes, at last, describes his struggle to love and live with a beautiful, talented woman suffering from serious clinical depression. Middlebrook draws heavily on the book, as well as Hughes' papers at Emory University, Sylvia Plath's journals and papers at Smith College, and an abundance of written material heretofore unavailable.

Ms. Middlebrook also analyzes the profound effect both poets had on each other's work. She writes, "One of the most mutually productive literary marriages of the 20th century lasted only about 2300 days. But until they uncoupled their lives in October 1962, each witnessed the creation of everything the other wrote, and engaged the other's work at the level of its artistic purposes. They recognized the ingenuity of solutions to artistic problems that they both understood very well." Hughes believed that he and Plath had similar dispositions and often felt as if he was drawing on a "single shared mind." They shared tastes in literature, authors and poets. They sketched together, wrote together and were physically a passionate, well-matched pair. The author documents the descent of their happiness to drama and despair, while showing the effect of these emotions on their work.

Diane Middlebrook's insightful, literate, well-crafted biography must have been difficult to write. The amount of grief and pain contained in the literary work she researched and the lives she wrote about boggles the mind - and hurts the heart. She is a partisan of poetry - not of Ted Hughes nor of Sylvia Plath. She remains as objective as possible when drawing her conclusions. And most importantly, her focus is on the impact that Sylvia Plath's life and death had on her husband and his writing, allowing Plath's legacy to live on posthumously.
JANA

Finally, a biography about the artists Plath and Hughes
Having read biographies and criticism about Plath for the past 15 years, this is the first book that gives an unsympathetic account of Plath and Hughes' lives as artists, as mentors to each other, and as a couple. If you are interested in Plath and Hughes as writers, not merely the circumstances surrounding Plath's suicide, then this is a book you must read. Middlebrook is a wonderful biographer. She gives insights into poems, intellectual interests and belief systems of Plath and Hughes. By the end of the book, I felt I had a more well-rounded view of their lives together, as well as Plath and Hughes as artists and individuals in their own right. Well done.