Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

by Andrew Wilson

ISBN: 9780857205896

Published: 2014

On 25 February 1956, twenty-three-year-old Sylvia Plath walked into a party and immediately spotted Ted Hughes. This encounter - now one of the most famous in all literary history - was recorded by Plath in her journal, where she described Hughes as a 'big, dark, hunky boy'. Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow has obscured Plath's life and work. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship have dominated the cultural landscape to such an extent that their story has taken on the resonance of a modern myth. After Plath's suicide in February 1963, Hughes became Plath's literary executor, the guardian of her writings, and, in effect responsible for how she was perceived. But Hughes did not think much of Plath's prose writing, viewing it as a 'waste product' of her 'false self', and his determination to market her later poetry - poetry written after she had begun her relationship with him - as the crowning glory of her career,...