Product Description

The first-ever full-length biography of Assia Wevill, the lover of Ted Hughes and rival of Sylvia Plath.

My true wife and the best friend I ever had," wrote Ted Hughes after Assia Wevill's 1969 suicide. Long seen as the woman who lured Hughes away from Sylvia Plath, Wevill has remained a mysterious figure. Now, for the first time Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev tell the story of Wevill's remarkable life and the seven years she spent with Hughes before killing herself, and their daughter, in a manner that inevitably recalled Plath's suicide six years earlier.

Drawing on previously unavailable papers, including Wevill's diaries and intimate correspondence with Hughes, Koren and Negev offer a gripping portrayal of the uneasy life the couple shared under Plath's long shadow.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #634976 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The "other woman" in the Sylvia Plath–Ted Hughes divorce receives long-delayed consideration in this assiduously researched, compulsively readable biography, where the authors draw on newly revealed primary sources. The life of thrice-married Assia Wevill (1927–1969) makes a fascinating story even before her six-year affair with Hughes and the birth of his (unacknowledged) daughter, Shura. Born in Berlin of a Russian Jewish father and a German Lutheran mother, raised in Tel Aviv, married to a British soldier in order to gain a British passport, Assia was, as the authors demonstrate, a smoldering femme fatale, albeit highly intelligent, witty and talented. While Koren and Negev (In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe) don't whitewash Assia's volatile, self-absorbed personality or her serial adulteries, they do contradict the widespread impression that Assia was the initial seducer of Hughes. This will be an important book for Hughes scholars, primarily for the authors' exclusive 1996 interview with the poet, in which he identified the poems he wrote alluding to Assia after her death, which he felt no critic had ever interpreted correctly. Newly revealed letters and interviews reinforce previous accounts of Hughes's sexual attraction and the dedicated philandering that drove two women to suicide. Photos. (Jan. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The adventurous biographical duo Koren and Negev follow their unusual Holocaust tale, In Our Hearts We Were Giants (2004), with the first complete biography of one of literature's most shadowed figures. The tragic story of Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes and subsequent suicide has been assiduously analyzed after the story of the second catastrophic relationship in Hughes' life of many love affairs finally emerged. He and Plath broke up for many painful reasons, but the catalyst was the dramatically beautiful Assia Weevil. Little has been widely known about this bright, artistic, magnetically attractive, and, finally, devastated woman of Russian Jewish and German Lutheran blood and numerous entanglements, or the nature of her tumultuous seven-year relationship with Hughes and her influence on his work, or Hughes' feelings toward their daughter. Koren and Negev, privy to previously unavailable sources, sensitively synthesize a cache of volatile information to create a fully dimensional and deeply disconcerting portrait of Weevil, who committed suicide in 1969 in the same manner as Plath but took her young daughter with her. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"...a fascinating portrait." -- O, The Oprah magazine

"The authors write with nimble, novelistic pacing..." -- The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A fine addition to the wealth of material available about Plath and Hughes
Finally, the story of Assia Gutmann Wevill is told, and what a story it is. The life of the "other woman" in the mythic marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes seems eerily like the life of Plath herself. Even the excerpts from Wevill's journals sound -- in tone, style, and content -- like they could have been ripped from Plath's own journals.

I have studied Plath's life and work for a long time, so I am always interested in any new material that is brought to light. The authors have done a fine job with this book. I have read their previous book, "In Our Hearts We Were Giants," which was well-researched and interesting, but I believe their book about Assia Wevill is more well-written; I could barely put it down.

And I have to admit -- after reading Diane Middlebrook's excellent biography of Ted Hughes, "Her Husband," I gained quite a bit of understanding and sympathy for Mr. Hughes. The biography of Assia Wevill, however, negated all of that. I will be interested to reread "Her Husband," and see if I regain any of that feeling.

And now they are all gone, all of these unbelievably intense, brilliant people, so heavily laden with self, self, self. It's likely we'll never know the truth about how everything went down. And down and down, until everybody was dead.

The saddest thing of all is the murder of Shura Wevill, four years old and innocent of everything.

Fascinating look at an era
Not only is this book the story of Assia and Ted Hughes, it also takes the reader on a wonderful trip back in time to pre-Hitler Germany. I love biographies which tell not only the life of the main character but begin with the subject's "beginning", including parents and grandparents and the world they faced during their lives. This approach reveals the forces and influences which formed the main character; in this case, Assia. This is a tragic story - a story which breaks your heart by the time you turn the final pages. The writing is intelligent and informative without being pedantic and carries the reader along as though you are there on the journey with Assia. Never gets bogged down with theory or analysis - just unfolds as it happens to a beautiful, sad, bright woman with fatal flaws.

Great Read
I have read several biographies of Sylvia Plath, and one of Ted Hughes, but Assia seems to have been the forgotten point of the triangle. This book was very informative, giving lots of insight as to what made these people tick, and explains some of the mysteries of the lives of these three people. A very interesting book.