Books & Poetry

In the Grand Guignol of the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes relationship, Assia Wevill is the missing player. So often cast as the home-wrecking death mistress, her real role has been suppressed and unattended until this gripping literary biography. Exotic and a bit dangerous, Wevill never wanted an ordinary life, nor did she get one. Six years after Plath’s death, she would commit suicide herself, taking her four-year-old daughter by Hughes along with her.

Wife of poet David Wevill, Assia grew up half-Jewish in Palestine after her parents presciently got the family out of Germany in 1934. As a teenage beauty, she attracted the attention of all around her. Instead of wearing shorts like the sabra girls, she dressed as a European sophisticate and attended an English-style finishing school in Jaffa. Later, working in London as an advertising copywriter, she walked into the Hughes-Plath drama after answering their advertisement for a flat in Primrose Hill.

The mutual attraction between Wevill and Hughes became an obsession on both sides, and the frenzied affair they quickly began hastened the end of Hughes’s already strained marriage. Days after Plath’s suicide, Wevill moved into the ‘death flat’ at 23 Fitzroy Road with Hughes and his two young children, an arrangement which he, in an effort to avoid opprobrium, was keen to keep quiet. But the weight of Plath’s death and the cumulative guilt in its aftermath blighted the Wevill-Hughes relationship, which wore itself out after six years.

Up until the month of her suicide, they were still hunting for a place in which to settle the family together under one roof, though Hughes always found a reason to reject every house, no matter how ideal. For Wevill, this was the final confirmation that he never really intended to make a home with her.

Wevill called herself a ‘lover of unreason’ and, in a suicide note, cursed her mistake in living for a false dream – an acknowledged, secure life with Hughes. For years pilloried by Plath’s feminist biographers, Hughes finally retorted with his magnificent ‘Birthday Letters’ in 1998. With this biography he’s back on the block, and it doesn’t look good.

Wevill’s story is a fascinating analysis of how talent, selfishness, beauty and obsession combine to make a tragedy. ‘I was endowed with too many minor qualities,’ she wrote, ‘but with neither the will nor the huge intelligence to bring them to a life of their own.’ Throughout his life, Hughes attempted to downplay Wevill’s place in his history. It has been left to her biographers to paint her back into the picture. This book completes the portrait, harrowing though it is.