103. Assia Wevill, journal, Nov. 1966. 1.77, MSS 1058, Emory.
104. Jillian Becker to Harriet Rosenstein, 21 Mar. 1974. Provided to HC by Jillian Becker.
105. EF interview with Keith Sagar, Jan. 2000. EFP.
106. HC interview with Ruth Fainlight, May 2016, London.
107. William Trevor, Excursions in the Real World (London: Penguin, 1993), 121.
108. Assia’s journal is quoted in Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, 200.
109. Jillian Becker to Harriet Rosenstein, 21 Mar. 1974. Provided to HC by Jillian Becker.
110. This was the statement the au pair gave to the police in 1969. Quoted in Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, 201.
111. TH to Celia Chaikin, 14 Apr. 1969. LTH, 290.
112. EF interview with Ruth Fainlight, Feb. 2000. EFP.
113. TH to Celia Chaikin, 14 Apr. 1969. LTH, 290.
114. Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 2000), 279.
115. HC interview with David Compton, May 2016, Bowdoinham, Maine.
116. HC interview with Dr. Francis de Marneffe, Dec. 2014, Westwood, Mass.
117. TH to Al Alvarez, Nov. 1971. LTH, 323.
118. OHP to AP, 6 Aug. 1963. Lilly.
119. HC interview with Ruth Fainlight, May 2016, London.
120. Ruth Fainlight, “1963—World Events,” Jubilee Lines, Carol Ann Duffy, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).
121. HC interview with Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, May 2016, Cornwall.
122. HC interview with David Compton, May 2016, Bowdoinham, Maine.
123. HC interview with Elinor Friedman Klein, Oct. 2015, South Salem, N.Y.
124. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Marcia Brown Stern, 1972. 4.16, MSS 1489, Emory.
125. HC interview with Janet Salter Rosenberg, Sept. 2015, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
126. Brian Cox, “Ted Hughes (1930–1998): A Personal Retrospect,” Hudson Review 52.1 (Spring 1999): 29–43. 37.
127. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Anthony Thwaite, 1971. 4.17, MSS 1489, Emory.
128. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, 1970. 2.17, MSS 1489, Emory.
129. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Richard Murphy, 1974. 2.25, MSS 1489, Emory.
130. AP to The Observer, 4 Mar. 1963 (unsent). Lilly.
131. HC interview with Lorna Secker-Walker, June 2017, London.
132. AP to Miriam Baggett, 27 Jan. 1964. 29.2 SPC, Smith.
133. AP to Miriam Baggett, 19 Apr. 1966. 29.2, SPC, Smith.
134. AP to Miriam Baggett, 7 July 1966. 29.2, SPC, Smith.
135. AP’s copy of Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology is at SPC, Smith.
136. AP, “For the Authors’ Series Talk—Wellesley College Club,” 16 Mar. 1976. 30.58, SPC, Smith.
137. Video footage of Aurelia Plath, Nov. 1986, in Poets of New England: Sylvia Plath and the Myth of the Monstrous Mother. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, AIMS Video Services. Courtesy of Richard Larschan. 2001.
138. AP to Paul Alexander, Apr. 1983. Courtesy of Richard Larschan.
139. AP to Miriam Baggett, 4 Dec. 1966. 29.2, SPC, Smith.
140. Video footage of Aurelia Plath, Nov. 1986.
141. TH, “Trial,” section 19. Add MS 88993/1/1, BL.
142. AP to Paul Alexander, Apr. 1983. Courtesy of Richard Larschan.
143. AP to Miriam Baggett, 4 Dec. 1966. 29.2, SPC, Smith.
144. Eric Walter White to Jack Sweeney, 22 Feb. 1963. LA 52/348, Jack and Máire Sweeney Papers, UCD.
145. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Wilbury Crockett, 1971. 1.19, MSS 1489, Emory.
146. Anita Helle, “ ‘Family Matters’: An Afterword on the Biography of Sylvia Plath,” Northwest Review 26 (1988): 148–60. 154–55.
147. HC interview with Phil McCurdy, May 2016, Ogunquit, Maine.
148. Wilbury Crockett to AP, 27 Mar. 1963. Lilly.
149. Al Alvarez, Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 217; 219.
150. Alvarez, Savage God, 40.
151. Ibid., 36.
152. TH to Olwyn Hughes, spring 1963. Add MS 88948/1/2, BL.
153. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Feb. 1963. Add MS 88948/1/2, BL.
154. HC telephone interview with Jillian Becker, 17 Apr. 2017.
155. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Feb. 1963. Add MS 88948/1/2, BL.
156. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001), Catholic moral philosopher and student of Wittgenstein, also a Newnham alumna who taught at Cambridge. Anscombe translated and edited Wittgenstein’s work and is considered to be one of the greatest women philosophers of the twentieth century. She was married to the British philosopher Peter Geach and was a mother of seven. Plath did not mention Anscombe in any of her surviving writings, though she may have been inspired by Anscombe’s ability to balance both a large family and a demanding career. Peter Steinberg speculates, however, that Hughes is talking about Plath’s Smith friend Jane Truslow, the wife of Peter Davison, whom Plath referred to in a letter, mockingly, as “Peter Geekie” (SP to Elinor Friedman, 9 Apr. 1957. L2, 109). Truslow had also lived in Lawrence House and had shock therapy. Steinberg believes that Hughes may have misspelled Davison’s nickname in this journal entry. (Peter Steinberg email to HC, May 2018.)
157. TH, notebook entry, spring 1963. Add MS 88918/129/3, BL.
158. The book is now held in TH and SP’s library at Emory.
159. TH to Anne Stevenson, autumn 1986. LTH, 523–24.
160. Ibid., 523.
161. The first six lines of this draft are excised in TH’s hand. Add MS 88918/1/2–8, BL.
162. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 4 Feb. 1963. L2, 967.
163. Alvarez, Savage God, 49.
164. AP to Paul Alexander, Apr. 1983. Courtesy of Richard Larschan.
165. TH to Rosemarie Rowley, 4 Dec. 1997. Add MS 88918/35/28, BL. See Rosemarie Rowley, “Electro-Convulsive Treatment in Sylvia Plath’s Life and Work,” Thumbscrew 10 (Spring 1998): 87-99, for further discussion about Plath and ECT. Ted Hughes called this article “one of the most important things I’ve read about S. P.” in his 4 Dec. 1997 letter to Rowley.
166. Eric Walter White to Jack Sweeney, 22 Feb. 1963. LA 52/348, Jack and Máire Sweeney Papers, UCD.
167. Alvarez, Savage God, 107.
168. SP, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 172.
169. HC interview with Elinor Friedman Klein, Oct. 2015, South Salem, N.Y.
170. TH, “Delivering Frieda,” eventually revised and included in Birthday Letters as “Remission.” Add MS 88918/1/2–8, BL.
171. Bate, Ted Hughes, 515; Jonathan Bate email to HC, 13 June 2016. Olwyn Hughes told Bate she had read a passage in Plath’s last journal about “taking the children’s lives too” when she died. She told Bate Hughes had also wanted to destroy the journal to “protect the children from the spectacle of reading about their mother humiliating herself with other men”—by which she meant Richard Murphy, Al Alvarez, and, allegedly, W. S. Merwin. Olwyn claimed that Plath had made advances at Merwin in Jan. 1963, though Merwin was in America at this time.
172. In a 1998 letter to Keith Sagar, Hughes wrote, “Heard rumours recently that SP’s journals from 1959 to 1963 (end of 62) were ‘seen,’ in the sixties. They must have existed, for sure, because I burned one covering the last couple of months—and at that point (early 63), that must have been a continuation of journals right up to it. Strange business—trail’s gone cold at the moment.” Sagar, Poet and Critic, 262–63.
173. Donna E. Stewart and Simone Vigod, “Postpartum Depression,” New England Journal of Medicine (2016): 375; 2177–86.
174. According to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual-V of the American Psychiat
ric Association, “The risk of postpartum episodes with psychotic features is particularly increased for women with prior postpartum mood episodes but is also elevated for those with a prior history of depressive or bipolar disorder (especially bipolar 1 disorder) and those with a family history of bipolar disorders.” American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013.
POSTSCRIPT: A POET’S EPITAPH
1. TH, draft of “Life after Death.” Add MS88918/2–8, BL.
2. Anon., “Tragic Death of Young Authoress,” St. Pancras Chronicle (22 Feb. 1963), AA 33. A full obituary ran in the Wellesley Townsman on 21 Feb. The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and The Boston Traveler ran brief death notices on 27 and 28 Feb. None of them mentioned Plath’s profession as a writer.
3. The suicide rate would drop dramatically when the city switched from coal gas to less lethal natural gas.
4. Plath had sent him some of the poems herself, though “Edge” must have come from Hughes.
5. Nathaniel Tarn, diary notes, 17 Feb. 1963. M1132, Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.
6. A. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen, 1999), 209–10.
7. The programs were broadcast on 10 July 1963 and 18 Feb. 1964, respectively.
8. P. H. Newby to Douglas Cleverdon, 6 Mar. 1963. BBC Written Archives. See Peter K. Steinberg and Gail Crowther, “These Ghostly Archives,” Plath Profiles 2 (Summer 2009): 183–208. 197.
9. David Machin to TH, 15 Mar. 1963. 17.49, SPC, Smith.
10. TH to Joan Hughes, 1963. 1.3, MSS 854, 1963, Emory.
11. TH to Al Alvarez, 15 Oct. 1981. Add MS 88593, BL.
12. See Peter K. Steinberg’s website, http://www.sylviaplath.info, for Plath’s complete periodical bibliography.
13. TH to Charles Monteith, 7 Apr. 1964. LTH, 233.
14. TH to Donald Hall, late 1963. LTH, 225–26.
15. TH to Keith Sagar, 23 May 1981. Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes & Keith Sagar, Keith Sagar, ed. (London: British Library, 2012), 108.
16. Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 238.
17. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, 27 Oct. 1963. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 513.
18. Al Alvarez to TH, 23 Oct. 1981. Add MS 88593, BL. In this letter, Alvarez told Hughes he shouldn’t have destroyed Plath’s last journals, just hidden them until “everyone who could be hurt is dead & gone.”
19. HC interview with Al Alvarez, May 2016, London.
20. Robert Lowell, “Foreword,” in Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), viii.
21. M. L. Rosenthal, “Poets of the Dangerous Way,” Spectator (Mar. 1965), 367.
22. Anon., “The Blood Jet Is Poetry,” Time (10 June 1966), 118–20.
23. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 46.
24. Will Wooten notes that the stanza “gained a large audience through being quoted” in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, eds. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 13. Will Wooten, The Alvarez Generation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 156.
25. TH to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July 1998. Sagar, Poet and Critic, 270.
26. TH to AP, 12 Jan. 1975. 16.3, MSS 644, Emory.
27. TH to Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe, c. 1980s. Add MS 88918/35/28, BL.
28. Ibid.
29. TH to Bill Merwin, 9 June 1988. LTH, 545.
30. TH to Lucas Myers, 14 Feb. 1987. LTH, 536–37.
31. AP, “Points to Bring Out in Talks and Interviews.” Aurelia wrote, “I have been bombarded by accusations of deliberate exclusion of pertinent material in my editing of my daughter’s letters. My original manuscript contained 1,018 typed pages, which had to be sent to my late daughter’s husband for his approval and cutting….What excisions I made were in cases of repetition, domestic details, requests for library materials to which I had access and the like which would hold little or no interest for the reader.” Courtesy of Richard Larschan.
32. AP to Miriam Baggett, 13 Nov. 1974. 29.2, SPC, Smith.
33. AP to Carol Hughes, 5 July 1982. 143.1a, MSS 644, Emory.
34. This quote comes from Koren and Negev’s interview with Hughes in 1996. Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), 227.
35. Add MS 88918/1/2-8, BL.
36. TH to Gerald and Joan Hughes, May 1969. 1.3, MSS 854, Emory.
37. TH, notebook 11. 57.10, MSS 644, Emory.
38. The Plath estate eventually settled with Anderson for $150,000. Bate, Ted Hughes, 438.
39. TH to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July 1998. Sagar, Poet and Critic, 271.
40. TH to Craig Raine, 5 Apr. 1997. Add MS 88918/35/25, BL.
41. TH to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July 1998. Sagar, Poet and Critic, 271.
42. TH to Michael Schmidt, 2 Mar. 1998. Add MS 88918/35/28, BL.
43. TH to Nicholas Hughes, 20 Feb. 1998. LTH, 712–13.
44. TH to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July 1998. Sagar, Poet and Critic, 270–71.
45. SP, draft of “Edge.” 8.77, SPC, Smith.
46. TH, “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” TriQuarterly 7 (Fall 1966): 81–88. 84.
Illustration Credits
1, 2, 3, 4All four studio photos of Otto Plath: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
5, 6, 7All three photos from Plath’s infancy: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
8SP with book, 1934: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
9SP, Winthrop, Massachusetts, c. 1936: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of AP
10AP, SP, and Dorothy Schober, c. 1936: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
11SP and AP, 1937: Helle Collection, Courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
12SP’s scrapbook: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of SP
13SP on bike, c. 1942–43: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of AP
14SP in Girl Scout uniform, 1946: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of AP
15SP in her yard, 1947: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of AP
1626 Elmwood Road, 1948: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of AP
17SP’s drawing of AP, 1948: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of SP
18SP, WP, and AP, 1949: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of AP
19SP dressed up for a dance, 1949: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of AP
20The Norton boys: Courtesy of Lilly Library
21SP and friends, 1949: Courtesy of Lilly Library
22SP’s graduation portrait, 1950: Helle Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
23SP at Star Island, 1949: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of AP
24SP on graduation day, 1950: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of AP
25Paradise Pond, Smith College: © HC
26OHP, 1964: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
27SP and Marcia Brown, 1951: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
28SP and Haven House friends, 1951: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
29SP and DN at Yale junior prom, 1951: Courtesy of Li
lly Library
30SP and the Mayo children, 1951: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of Marcia Brown Stern
31SP sunbathing in Marblehead, 1951: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of Marcia Brown Stern
32The Mayo mansion: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of SP
33SP with bicycle, 1951: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Estate of Marcia Brown Stern
34SP with Perry Norton, 1953: Courtesy of Lilly Library
35SP with Myron Lotz, 1953: Courtesy of Lilly Library
36SP interviewing Elizabeth Bowen, 1953: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Black Star
37SP at St. Regis Hotel dance, 1953: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, © Black Star
38McLean Hospital: © HC
39Dr. Ruth Beuscher and family, late 1950s: Courtesy of British Library
40SP, studio portrait, 1954: Courtesy of Lilly Library, photo by Eric Stahlberg
41SP, AP, and WP, Christmas 1953: Courtesy of Lilly Library
42SP in Chatham, 1954: Courtesy of Lilly Library and Elizabeth Lameyer Gilmore, photo by Gordon Lameyer
43SP and Gordon Lameyer, Chatham, 1954: Courtesy of Lilly Library and Elizabeth Lameyer Gilmore
44SP with flower, c. 1954–55: Courtesy of Lilly Library and Elizabeth Lameyer Gilmore, photo by Gordon Lameyer
45SP’s Smith College room, 1955 (two photos): Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of SP
46SP and Marianne Moore, 1955: Mortimer Rare Book Collection, courtesy of Smith College Special Collections
47WP, SP, 1955: Courtesy of Lilly Library, © Estate of AP
48Newnham College, Cambridge, UK: © HC
49Whitstead, Cambridge, UK: © HC
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