Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage

Middlebrook, Diane

3.92

1,700 ratings by Goodreads

9780786188826: Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage

ISBN 10: 0786188820 ISBN 13: 9780786188826

Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks, 2004

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 who was haunted--and nourished--his entire life by the aftermath of his first marriage. Drawing on a trove of 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 has informed all of her 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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

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

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, which was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. A former professor at Stanford University, she lives in San Francisco and London.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.