In recent years, as constraints have been lifted, the secrets surrounding the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—the most brilliant literary couple since the Brownings and the Woolfs—have gradually been revealed. Plath’s mother, Aurelia, died in 1994, Hughes in 1998. His sister, Olwyn, who resented Plath’s beauty and talent, and who was intensely jealous of her intimacy with Hughes, no longer controls Plath’s estate, enforcing her self-serving version of the truth and forcing biographers to submit to her diktat. Hughes’s Birthday Letters, his long-delayed response to Plath’s shocking attacks in the Ariel poems, came out in 1998. Erica Wagner has written Ariel’s Gift (2000), a valuable study of these poems. Plath’s complete Journals—with 400 new pages—appeared to great acclaim in 2000.

This literary equivalent of the opening of the...

 

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