O Magazine
Diane Middlebrook’s shrewd and compelling biography . . . is a book of mysteries, delicately revealed.

The Washington Post Book World
A deep, rich, and satisfying biography of a marriage— harrowing and ironic, playful and grave.

The Baltimore Sun
Unquestionably the best book written thus far on these complicated geniuses.

Book Description
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were husband and wife; they were also two of the most remarkable poets of the twentieth century. In this stunning new account of their marriage, Diane Middlebrook draws on a trove of newly available papers to craft a beautifully written portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband haunted—and nourished—his entire life by his relationship to Sylvia Plath. Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer’s art and an up-close look at a couple who saw each other as the means to becoming who they wanted to be: writers and mythic representations of a whole generation.

About the Author
Diane Middlebrook is the author of the bestselling Anne Sexton: A Biography, which was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were husband and wife; they were also two of the most remarkable poets of the twentieth century. In this stunning new account of their marriage, acclaimed biographer Diane Middlebrook draws on a trove of newly available papers to craft a beautifully written portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband haunted -- and nourished -- his entire life by the aftermath of his wife's suicide. Penetrating, deeply insightful, and marvelously lucid, Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer's art and an up-close look at a couple who saw each other as the means to becoming who they wanted to be: writers and mythic figures representing their generation.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

… by choosing the aperture of their marriage through which to tell their story, Middlebrook manages to give us not just a double life but a distilled life: a sense of the everydayness of Plath and Hughes's extraordinary marriage, as well as an understanding of the psychic -- one might say occult -- lives that catapulted these two souls headlong into their poetry and into their terrible fates. She gives us their human marriage and their alchemical marriage -- one Hughes believed was fated, as expressed in Birthday Letters when he wrote that "the solar system married us." Hughes (and Plath, to a lesser degree) took their immersion in astrology and shamanism seriously, so Middlebrook gives us their natal astrological charts, and she interprets for us the signs and omens that fill their poetry and darkened their lives. She illustrates how imagery -- both in poetry and in the occult -- opens the mind to the flow of meaning. — Diane Middlebrook

The New York Times

Because the marriage was an emotionally fraught and artistically productive relationship, the narrative of Her Husband cannot help but fascinate, providing new tidbits of information and insight to anyone who has followed the melodrama of the poets' relationship and the scholarly deconstruction of their art and their lives.—Michiko Kakutani

The New York Times Book Review

Diane Middlebrook's ''Her Husband,''...offers up yet another look at this much-prodded-at, larger-than-life marriage....She has benefited from access to previously off-limits material, including letters and manuscripts by Ted Hughes. Still, one would be tempted to groan at this latest exhumation -- if only it weren't so transfixing a tale.

...Middlebrook casts a skeptical eye on most of the heartening post-mortem conjectures that have been broached over the years; Given that there is so little agreement on the details, it is all the more surprising that Middlebrook's overarching interpretation of the marriage as a partial triumph, rather than a wholesale tragedy, makes as persuasive a case as it does. Instead of ascribing blame or censure, she focuses on the ways in which the union of these two gifted and complicated people was, for a sustained period, a singular creative partnership -- a ''productive collusion'' -- that led to an almost magical symbiosis. — Daphne Merkin

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. Agent, Georges Borchardt. 8-city author tour. (On sale Oct. 13) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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