Dianne Middlebrook launches Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, appropriately, with the birth of the poets’ lives together. Through her retelling of the historic moment of their first meeting, Middlebrook sets the balanced, literate, and brutally honest tone that she maintains throughout the book. According to Middlebrook, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s first encounter was violent and almost mythic, punctuated with kisses and biting. In 112 days they were married. Together, as Middlebrook shows, they formed a unique literary bond. They remained aggressive intellectual and erotic partners. But, six years later, Hughes left Plath and their two children for another woman. She committed suicide shortly after, while Hughes would go on to a long and successful career as a poet and as Plath’s literary executor.

What Middlebrook brings to this story, outside of the almost voyeuristic details gleaned from letters, diaries, interviews, and past biographies, is a scholarly commitment to infuse the reading of Hughes and Plath’s marriage with a reading of their poetry and prose. In less capable hands, using literature to reconstruct biography can lead to an undisciplined avoidance of real historical research. But Middlebrook drafts the writings to bolster her understanding of the couple in sophisticated ways that link their private language to their public statements in published works (especially Hughes’ Birthday Letters). At the same time, Middlebrook remains deeply aware that Hughes and Plath worked to re-construct themselves through their writings, often with conflicting self-portraits, for posterity. She is comfortable letting their contradictions exist side by side.

Her Husband is wonderfully told; it is difficult to imagine how this narrative of the marriage could be surpassed. One only hopes that Middlebrook will have the stamina to amend her own work—if necessary—when Hughes’s most private papers are made public in 2023. --Patrick O’Kelley

From 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.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Middlebrook, the author of a seminal biography of poet Anne Sexton, presents the most balanced, most literary and interpretatively astute, and best-written analysis yet of the saga of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. By mapping the attractive, aggressive, ambitious, and profoundly inspired poets' family histories, and delving deeply into their dynamic imaginations, personal mythologies, and galvanizing poetry, Middlebrook brings mystical yet rapacious Hughes and frenetic and determined Plath into crisp focus, brilliantly explicating each poet's incomparable gifts and tragic flaws. What remains elusive is Plath's little understood and fatal mental illness. Had that poison not lurked, Middlebrook cogently argues, temperamental differences would have eventually ended the "most mutually productive literary marriage in the twentieth century." But Hughes embarked on a flagrant affair with Assia Wevill, Plath killed herself, and so, too, did Assia, six years later, after murdering Hughes' and her daughter. Middlebrook illuminates many heretofore shadowy aspects of this much-told and persistently controversial tale (see Kate Moses' Wintering [BKL F 1 03] for the best fictionalization), but, as discerning as Middlebrook's deeply moving study is, it won't be the last word: a sealed trunk sits in the Hughes archive, destined to be opened in 2023. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Joyce Carol Oates, The Washington Post Book World
"Sympathetic but resolutely unsentimental . . . intelligent, sensitive, at times harrowing."

Book Description
Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, at the outset of their brilliant careers. Plath's suicide six and a half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable, changed his life, his closest relationships, his standing in the literary world, and the style and substance of his verse. In this stunning new biography of their marriage, Diane Middlebrook presents a portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband haunted-and nourished-his entire life by the aftermath of his first marriage. Drawing on a trove of newly available papers Middlebrook presents Hughes as a complicated, conflicted figure: sexually magnetic, fiercely ambitious, immensely caring, and shrewd in business. She argues that Plath's suicide, though it devastated Hughes and made him vulnerable to the savage attacks of Plath's growing readership, ultimately gave him his true subject-how marriages fail and how men fail in marriage. Writing with the penetrating insight and lucid sympathy that informed her previous bestselling biographies, Middlebrook rises to the multiple challenges presented by this highly fraught, deeply controversial subject. Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer's art and craft.

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

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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