"In the spring of 1957 Plath’s old college friend Sue Weller visited her and Ted at Eltisley Avenue, and she recalled ‘Sylvia weeping copiously over her stove as she cooked’, with Ted doing nothing to console her. She wondered if he had decided he could no longer deal with Plath’s ‘emotional problems’. Ted Hughes ‘would not be her Leonard Woolf’ (Clark, 488). "
That's hard to read. I had never thought to compare Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath, but it's heartbreaking to think how much Virginia accomplished with the support of Leonard, compared to Sylvia's tragic story with her narcissist of a husband. So much lost potential.
I agree, Jodi - thanks very much for your comment. Leonard Woolf was exceptional in his devotion to Virginia and her work & it’s hard not to think that Ted Hughes was only interested in his own success.
I’ve tried to find some sliver of ‘like’ for Ted Hughes over the years and find myself wholly unable. I also try to keep his work ‘separate from the man’, and not chastise myself when I sit and contemplate the beauty of one of his poems. But then there’s Sylvia, and my anger flares and sadness fills me--a too short life (genius) caught in the crosshairs of an abominable narcissist.
Thanks Amy! I agree so much with what you say. I have always admired Hughes's poetry but more and more I can't put aside how he treated both Sylvia and Assia. Abominable indeed.
Ann, I love this essay. I'm unsurprised, but intrigued, by the lack of acknowledgment of Plath's domestic chores in Red Comet. I'm thinking of the letter she wrote to Ruth Beuscher in July 1962 in which she lists all of her domestic abilities: "I am a good cook, I mow the lawn, am getting to be a good gardener, I weed, afford a cleaner, earn half our income (this I feel is an advantage to both of us, for it frees Ted from a dull job to support us, & gives us travel money), make out the income tax, am a feeling & imaginative lay, & probably can write quite funny & good books." Also thinking of Hughes's later anger, during the editing of Letters Home, that Plath complained in letters about putting her writing after his during their marriage, how he wrote to Aurelia that he was the one who came last, always, and then complained that she didn't "dry dishes with her hair" (I'm paraphrasing), a line that always makes me howl laughing-- Plath wrote that strange, funny line in "Stings" about "[drying] plates with my dense hair," which Hughes apparently took literally. That line-- that whole poem, really-- encapsulates the "Ariel" poems: finding and revealing the wildness in women's domestic lives, lamenting the ways marriage, especially a bad marriage, can make our "strangeness evaporate/Blue dew from dangerous skin," refusing to give into that loss.
This also has me thinking about Assia Wevill's domestic life with Hughes, his "Draft Constitution," the 1968 letter he wrote to her in which he dictated what time she had to wake, what she had to cook, wear, and the kind of English she could speak if she and her daughter wanted to have a home with Hughes. No Leonard Woolf, indeed, that one. Just an ordinary coward, in the end.
Thank you Emily, for your detailed and very thoughtful response. What a poignant summarizing of her abilities in Plath's letter to Ruth Beuscher, with her writing of 'quite funny & good books' only right at the end - and heartbreaking that her poetry isn't even mentioned. Love the idea of Hughes fretting that others might think she really did dry the dishes with her hair (sums the man up, really).
This is all fascinating-- the post and then the replies. I didn’t know anything about Plath’s domestic life, and I love the depth of detail here. Thank you!
Thank you for reading it, Victoria, and it's great for me to hear from you and others. I enjoyed thinking about just this one short spell of Plath's life in Cambridge, and how already it carried the seeds of her later unhappiness as well as her amazing creativity despite all the challenges she faced.
I have to admit finding Plath a bit of a mystery. I'm sure that if I had studied English past GCSE stage, I'd have been taught her, or encouraged to read her, but somehow she completely passed me by. and now I'm a bit nervous about trying - supposing I don't 'get her'? I fear it damage my literary credentials, such as they are! But this is a very encouraging post, maybe I should try the biography first?
Thanks Sarah! I do think Clark’s biography is a really good introduction to Plath as it shows what she achieved through her poetry despite the prevailing literary culture that held her back even as it pushed Hughes forward. I felt huge admiration for Plath after reading it.
Thank you for this fascinating and detailed account of this period in Plath's life. I've always been a fan of both poets and artistically have never felt the need to take sides. In terms of the marriage, it's another story. Hughes was the beneficiary of a society that prioritised the artistic and professional needs of men over women and he was clearly all too happy with that arrangement. Seeing all those copies of the cookbook that Plath had to use to fulfil her so-called "duties" as wife makes me think of them as so many bricks in the wall. It's unutterably depressing.
Absolutely Jeffrey - and I was always a fan of Ted Hughes's poetry too. I realized early in my literature studies that many poets & writers wrote wonderfully but often behaved badly! I actually enjoyed Plath's poetry more as I have got older and discovered how serious she was about her writing - Philip Larkin always considered Plath the much better poet, and it's so sad that she didn't go on to write more. It's funny actually, I think she really did enjoy cooking, but came to realize that having to do it every day was taking precious time away from her work. Bricks in the wall is a good description!
I really enjoyed this brief glimpse of Plath's domestic arrangements. I find biographies, with very few exceptions, so boring -- and poor Plath has been so relentlessly biographied, from every possible direction, all the endless speculation and prurient reconstruction seems like a version of that suffocating domestic burden -- but I love this kind of well-written vignette that illuminates the rest of a life. I have always avoided the Plath "cult" because it seemed such a cliché as a literary-minded girl to be interested in her, and I disliked the hint of glamorizing suicide, but when I was 13 or 14 I read both some Plath and some Hughes at school and I thought she was obviously the better poet. Nothing I've read by either of them has ever changed my mind on that!
Thank you Victoria, you put this so well. I did read Letters Home and Ronald Hayman's biography back in the 1980s - and decided it was all too sad - so it was a revelation to read Clark's biography in the light of what had been written previously. The publication of Plath's collected letters made me see a different side to her, and shows the importance of proper scholarship being in some ways a corrective to the stories people like to tell themselves. I like your idea of all the biographies and myths being another type of burden weighing her down - and Philip Larkin always thought that Plath was a much better poet than Hughes.
Thank you for this illuminating article. I first read Plath as a teenaged woman; I think I memorized every Ariel poem, and many in her other volumes. I read them all, and everything I could find about her. I had a visceral hatred of Hughes from the beginning. Didn’t understand why, but this piece has validated my opinion. Red Comet was pure revelation. Thank you for sharing this brilliant, erudite piece. It’s like coming home.
Thank you Mary for your kind words. Trying also to get across a sense of the constraints of gender roles at this time, which pushed Plath back into domesticity and Hughes forward into the limelight. Incredibly unfair. Ariel is an extraordinary achievement indeed.
I read "Letters Home" many years ago as a young student, and it was my introduction to Plath, and I loved her and her writing. I remember being struck by her desire to be the perfect homemaker and suspect I would find this even more poignant now with a greater understanding of the frustration and anger this can bring.I loved this piece, thank you.
Thank you so much Deborah! 'Letters Home', bought in a secondhand Cambridge bookshop, was also my introduction to Plath back in the 1980s... and the title of my piece is a nod to that. Since then I've read several (pretty negative) biographies of her, and discovered how much of the 'real' Plath was left out of the letters to her mother. So I was very glad to read the outstanding Red Comet by Heather Clark, and discover how groundbreaking Plath's poetry and other writing really was.
I am so pleased to hear that - Red Comet changed my perspective on what Plath achieved in poetry and The Bell Jar- very interesting on mid-twentieth century history too, putting her work into context.
It is so chillingly poetic but also terrifying to see Sylvia's words and domestic inclinations knowing what she suffered and how she ended her life. I am always left just wishing her better, and that things turned out differently.
thank you for this. I am a plath-ian in that I see it as horror yet edgeless in breathlessness, where words per fume, the shooter sylvia, where do you keep your guns? kidding.... I manufactured a safer closet, she didnt closet. no she didnt. I do. I created a locker for the work. and kept from anybody but other poets sort of, struggle with its perfectionism, FAH. which I am always trying to get myself out of... embracing beauty and the deadly, sinking into language, and boxing with joyce, sorta -- let the lantern grapple with the naked lunch -- emily burroughs combos
Comparing Virginia Woolf's husband with Sylvia Plath's husband is disturbing. It could be thought that Virginia Woolf was very careful in selecting her life partner, to the point that she was perhaps very sure that he would never complain if she needed four hours in the morning to write. Marriage is a trust or should be that one partner will not complain about their partner's request for 4 hours writing time. It's difficult enough to figure out how to be productive in those four hours. I also think maybe Leonard Woolf had a solid sense of self confidence that Ted Hughes seems obviously not to have ever really had which was probably a liability to himself as well it was to his wife. One of the worst difficulties of being a writer is that in order to write, one must be supremely self-confident so that one's mind can offer answers to the fundamental riddle posed when staring at a blank page or screen. To be alone allows one time to work through this fundamental question. One's partner should be self-confident enough to function well independently, which serves as an example or role model and also to step in for their partner to help, knowing without being threatened that the time lent will not hold back their own individual progress. What could Sylvia Plath have achieved if Ted Hughes had been more like Leonard Woolf or been a more fully supportive masculine husband? We will never know. But another irony is that even though Leonard helped Virginia Woolf create a comfortable creative environment for herself at home, he couldn't, by himself, keep Hitler from possibly invading England. War is the worst enemy of creativity. However, it is pretty amazing how much Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath were actually able to create dispite all the patriarchal disfunction in their midst, both at home and out in the world.
Thank you Larry for your insightful comment. Yes, it's certainly invidious to compare two marriages (and four different people) from contrasting circumstances. I think it's hard not to be critical of Ted Hughes, but he like Plath was a product of his era and upbringing - and he was necessarily selfish, in his own terms, in order to succeed, while Leonard appeared to adopt the role, from the beginning, of taking care of Virginia - but even with the best intentions, he made mistakes and could not help her. And as you say, the external circumstances of war put terrible stresses on Woolf. Yet it is, as you say, amazing what both women managed to create despite everything.
I agree with your perspective on all four people. I think it means a lot that Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are the moms of their modern women writers saying here's what you have to look out for, here's what you might have to deal with and here's hoping that the societal environment will be more supportive of you then it was of us in our old school times of yore.
"In the spring of 1957 Plath’s old college friend Sue Weller visited her and Ted at Eltisley Avenue, and she recalled ‘Sylvia weeping copiously over her stove as she cooked’, with Ted doing nothing to console her. She wondered if he had decided he could no longer deal with Plath’s ‘emotional problems’. Ted Hughes ‘would not be her Leonard Woolf’ (Clark, 488). "
That's hard to read. I had never thought to compare Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath, but it's heartbreaking to think how much Virginia accomplished with the support of Leonard, compared to Sylvia's tragic story with her narcissist of a husband. So much lost potential.
I agree, Jodi - thanks very much for your comment. Leonard Woolf was exceptional in his devotion to Virginia and her work & it’s hard not to think that Ted Hughes was only interested in his own success.
I’ve tried to find some sliver of ‘like’ for Ted Hughes over the years and find myself wholly unable. I also try to keep his work ‘separate from the man’, and not chastise myself when I sit and contemplate the beauty of one of his poems. But then there’s Sylvia, and my anger flares and sadness fills me--a too short life (genius) caught in the crosshairs of an abominable narcissist.
Thanks Amy! I agree so much with what you say. I have always admired Hughes's poetry but more and more I can't put aside how he treated both Sylvia and Assia. Abominable indeed.
Ann, I love this essay. I'm unsurprised, but intrigued, by the lack of acknowledgment of Plath's domestic chores in Red Comet. I'm thinking of the letter she wrote to Ruth Beuscher in July 1962 in which she lists all of her domestic abilities: "I am a good cook, I mow the lawn, am getting to be a good gardener, I weed, afford a cleaner, earn half our income (this I feel is an advantage to both of us, for it frees Ted from a dull job to support us, & gives us travel money), make out the income tax, am a feeling & imaginative lay, & probably can write quite funny & good books." Also thinking of Hughes's later anger, during the editing of Letters Home, that Plath complained in letters about putting her writing after his during their marriage, how he wrote to Aurelia that he was the one who came last, always, and then complained that she didn't "dry dishes with her hair" (I'm paraphrasing), a line that always makes me howl laughing-- Plath wrote that strange, funny line in "Stings" about "[drying] plates with my dense hair," which Hughes apparently took literally. That line-- that whole poem, really-- encapsulates the "Ariel" poems: finding and revealing the wildness in women's domestic lives, lamenting the ways marriage, especially a bad marriage, can make our "strangeness evaporate/Blue dew from dangerous skin," refusing to give into that loss.
This also has me thinking about Assia Wevill's domestic life with Hughes, his "Draft Constitution," the 1968 letter he wrote to her in which he dictated what time she had to wake, what she had to cook, wear, and the kind of English she could speak if she and her daughter wanted to have a home with Hughes. No Leonard Woolf, indeed, that one. Just an ordinary coward, in the end.
Thank you Emily, for your detailed and very thoughtful response. What a poignant summarizing of her abilities in Plath's letter to Ruth Beuscher, with her writing of 'quite funny & good books' only right at the end - and heartbreaking that her poetry isn't even mentioned. Love the idea of Hughes fretting that others might think she really did dry the dishes with her hair (sums the man up, really).
This is all fascinating-- the post and then the replies. I didn’t know anything about Plath’s domestic life, and I love the depth of detail here. Thank you!
Thank you for reading it, Victoria, and it's great for me to hear from you and others. I enjoyed thinking about just this one short spell of Plath's life in Cambridge, and how already it carried the seeds of her later unhappiness as well as her amazing creativity despite all the challenges she faced.
I have to admit finding Plath a bit of a mystery. I'm sure that if I had studied English past GCSE stage, I'd have been taught her, or encouraged to read her, but somehow she completely passed me by. and now I'm a bit nervous about trying - supposing I don't 'get her'? I fear it damage my literary credentials, such as they are! But this is a very encouraging post, maybe I should try the biography first?
Thanks Sarah! I do think Clark’s biography is a really good introduction to Plath as it shows what she achieved through her poetry despite the prevailing literary culture that held her back even as it pushed Hughes forward. I felt huge admiration for Plath after reading it.
Thank you for this fascinating and detailed account of this period in Plath's life. I've always been a fan of both poets and artistically have never felt the need to take sides. In terms of the marriage, it's another story. Hughes was the beneficiary of a society that prioritised the artistic and professional needs of men over women and he was clearly all too happy with that arrangement. Seeing all those copies of the cookbook that Plath had to use to fulfil her so-called "duties" as wife makes me think of them as so many bricks in the wall. It's unutterably depressing.
Absolutely Jeffrey - and I was always a fan of Ted Hughes's poetry too. I realized early in my literature studies that many poets & writers wrote wonderfully but often behaved badly! I actually enjoyed Plath's poetry more as I have got older and discovered how serious she was about her writing - Philip Larkin always considered Plath the much better poet, and it's so sad that she didn't go on to write more. It's funny actually, I think she really did enjoy cooking, but came to realize that having to do it every day was taking precious time away from her work. Bricks in the wall is a good description!
I really enjoyed this brief glimpse of Plath's domestic arrangements. I find biographies, with very few exceptions, so boring -- and poor Plath has been so relentlessly biographied, from every possible direction, all the endless speculation and prurient reconstruction seems like a version of that suffocating domestic burden -- but I love this kind of well-written vignette that illuminates the rest of a life. I have always avoided the Plath "cult" because it seemed such a cliché as a literary-minded girl to be interested in her, and I disliked the hint of glamorizing suicide, but when I was 13 or 14 I read both some Plath and some Hughes at school and I thought she was obviously the better poet. Nothing I've read by either of them has ever changed my mind on that!
Thank you Victoria, you put this so well. I did read Letters Home and Ronald Hayman's biography back in the 1980s - and decided it was all too sad - so it was a revelation to read Clark's biography in the light of what had been written previously. The publication of Plath's collected letters made me see a different side to her, and shows the importance of proper scholarship being in some ways a corrective to the stories people like to tell themselves. I like your idea of all the biographies and myths being another type of burden weighing her down - and Philip Larkin always thought that Plath was a much better poet than Hughes.
Wow, this is great
Cheers, Remy, I'm enjoying your pieces too- and love your title
Thank you for this illuminating article. I first read Plath as a teenaged woman; I think I memorized every Ariel poem, and many in her other volumes. I read them all, and everything I could find about her. I had a visceral hatred of Hughes from the beginning. Didn’t understand why, but this piece has validated my opinion. Red Comet was pure revelation. Thank you for sharing this brilliant, erudite piece. It’s like coming home.
Thank you Mary for your kind words. Trying also to get across a sense of the constraints of gender roles at this time, which pushed Plath back into domesticity and Hughes forward into the limelight. Incredibly unfair. Ariel is an extraordinary achievement indeed.
thank you for this excellent piece.
That’s very kind of you Danyel- much appreciated.
Love Plath and loved this piece! Thank you, Ann :)
Thank you Kate! Very much enjoying your Substack too - very good to have you as my role model in shining a light on women's stories.
Aww, thank you, Ann! Here's to more celebrating of women's narratives in the new year! 😀
I read "Letters Home" many years ago as a young student, and it was my introduction to Plath, and I loved her and her writing. I remember being struck by her desire to be the perfect homemaker and suspect I would find this even more poignant now with a greater understanding of the frustration and anger this can bring.I loved this piece, thank you.
Thank you so much Deborah! 'Letters Home', bought in a secondhand Cambridge bookshop, was also my introduction to Plath back in the 1980s... and the title of my piece is a nod to that. Since then I've read several (pretty negative) biographies of her, and discovered how much of the 'real' Plath was left out of the letters to her mother. So I was very glad to read the outstanding Red Comet by Heather Clark, and discover how groundbreaking Plath's poetry and other writing really was.
I confess I have found much of what has been written about her difficult and so I passed "Red Comet" by. But I will now remedy that, thank you.
I am so pleased to hear that - Red Comet changed my perspective on what Plath achieved in poetry and The Bell Jar- very interesting on mid-twentieth century history too, putting her work into context.
It is so chillingly poetic but also terrifying to see Sylvia's words and domestic inclinations knowing what she suffered and how she ended her life. I am always left just wishing her better, and that things turned out differently.
thank you for this. I am a plath-ian in that I see it as horror yet edgeless in breathlessness, where words per fume, the shooter sylvia, where do you keep your guns? kidding.... I manufactured a safer closet, she didnt closet. no she didnt. I do. I created a locker for the work. and kept from anybody but other poets sort of, struggle with its perfectionism, FAH. which I am always trying to get myself out of... embracing beauty and the deadly, sinking into language, and boxing with joyce, sorta -- let the lantern grapple with the naked lunch -- emily burroughs combos
Thanks Dusty - your language is so powerful. Keep up the struggle!
Comparing Virginia Woolf's husband with Sylvia Plath's husband is disturbing. It could be thought that Virginia Woolf was very careful in selecting her life partner, to the point that she was perhaps very sure that he would never complain if she needed four hours in the morning to write. Marriage is a trust or should be that one partner will not complain about their partner's request for 4 hours writing time. It's difficult enough to figure out how to be productive in those four hours. I also think maybe Leonard Woolf had a solid sense of self confidence that Ted Hughes seems obviously not to have ever really had which was probably a liability to himself as well it was to his wife. One of the worst difficulties of being a writer is that in order to write, one must be supremely self-confident so that one's mind can offer answers to the fundamental riddle posed when staring at a blank page or screen. To be alone allows one time to work through this fundamental question. One's partner should be self-confident enough to function well independently, which serves as an example or role model and also to step in for their partner to help, knowing without being threatened that the time lent will not hold back their own individual progress. What could Sylvia Plath have achieved if Ted Hughes had been more like Leonard Woolf or been a more fully supportive masculine husband? We will never know. But another irony is that even though Leonard helped Virginia Woolf create a comfortable creative environment for herself at home, he couldn't, by himself, keep Hitler from possibly invading England. War is the worst enemy of creativity. However, it is pretty amazing how much Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath were actually able to create dispite all the patriarchal disfunction in their midst, both at home and out in the world.
Thank you Larry for your insightful comment. Yes, it's certainly invidious to compare two marriages (and four different people) from contrasting circumstances. I think it's hard not to be critical of Ted Hughes, but he like Plath was a product of his era and upbringing - and he was necessarily selfish, in his own terms, in order to succeed, while Leonard appeared to adopt the role, from the beginning, of taking care of Virginia - but even with the best intentions, he made mistakes and could not help her. And as you say, the external circumstances of war put terrible stresses on Woolf. Yet it is, as you say, amazing what both women managed to create despite everything.
Ann,
I agree with your perspective on all four people. I think it means a lot that Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are the moms of their modern women writers saying here's what you have to look out for, here's what you might have to deal with and here's hoping that the societal environment will be more supportive of you then it was of us in our old school times of yore.
I don't actually read Plath very much, but this is heartbreaking.