The wedding photos, part 2
In search of Plath and Hughes's hidden photographs
Welcome to the second part of my post about the secret wedding of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on Bloomsday, June 16 1956 and the black and white studio photographs taken of the couple (Plath wearing her wedding dress) in early December 1956 (you can read Part 1 here). This part is about these photographs’ mysterious disappearance and the striking ways in which they have re-emerged.
In 2020 Granta Books in the UK reissued Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (first published in the US in 1993) with a striking new cover design. Near the top of the cover there is a photograph of Plath and Hughes in three-quarters profile, one of the ‘official’ portraits taken to celebrate their wedding six months earlier (their June wedding was previously a secret: see Part 1). This small black and white photo of the couple has been drenched in a dark red that makes the image stand out starkly against the cover’s creamy white background. “The intention is absolutely that it is shocking,” the designer Luke Bird told me when I asked him about his choice of colours. “It goes back to that idea of referencing the tragedy in the marriage, and in Plath’s life.”
Coincidentally, another photo from this 1956 series features on the cover of Red Comet, Heather Clark’s Pulitzer-shortlisted biography, also published in 2020.1 For the first UK edition of Red Comet, seen above, the designer Suzanne Dean has set a black and white photograph of Plath against a velvety black background, with the title of the book in red above her. It looks like a single portrait of Plath, serenely smiling in soft three-quarter profile, but when you turn over the book, there is a surprise.
There is Ted Hughes in profile on the back cover, smartly dressed in jacket and tie and smiling just a little, close-lipped. We realize that he is looking over at Plath, just as she gazes warmly at him across the book’s spine. What we might assume, judging by the book’s cover, to be a photograph of Plath is, in fact, a double portrait.
The images on the covers of both of these recent books are based on thirteen photographs taken by Cambridge photographer Lettice Ramsey to commemorate Plath and Hughes’s Bloomsday wedding in 1956, when the couple were at their happiest. But the original glass slides (negatives) of these photographs remained hidden away for over fifty years in a dusty Cambridge studio, and these formal portraits do not appear in earlier biographies of Plath or Hughes. So why did the couple dislike their own wedding photos so much?
The studio session
It was on a mild winter’s day in early December 1956, six months after their wedding, that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes walked from their rented flat in Newnham a mile or so to the studio of Ramsey & Muspratt in Post Office Terrace in Cambridge. It seems that this was all her mother’s idea: Aurelia had sent Sylvia a cheque to pay for a set of photographs that she could to mail out to her American friends and family, who would have read about the marriage in a notice she had put in the newspaper not long before. The pictures would be a way of making the wedding seem a reality, and a visual proof of her daughter’s new status as a married woman with a handsome English husband.
A couple of weeks after their visit to the studio, the weather in Cambridge had turned bitterly cold. Plath and Hughes were spending their first weeks living together as an officially married couple in a dingy rented flat that was barely warmed by one small coal fire in the sitting room (see my post, ‘Sylvia Plath at home’). To cheer them up, Aurelia sent them various American gifts, including a package of cookies that Ted couldn’t resist opening straightaway, and even more welcome, a sum of much-needed money. As Sylvia told her,
“We bought ourselves a huge cutting knife for bread & meat and a great Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which is now our favorite book--- for our own Christmas presents.”
A less pleasing letter for the couple was an invoice from Ramsey & Muspratt, with the contact sheets for them to choose four out of the thirteen photographs Lettice Ramsey had taken. The problem was that the couple disliked the images, as Sylvia explained to her mother (‘Ted hates them all’) enclosing the “grisly proofs” with her Christmas card.
It's true that Ramsey’s black and white studio photos present a very different atmosphere from their impulsive, romantic wedding in June of that year. Then, with only Sylvia's mother and the curate present as witnesses, Plath and Hughes exchanged their vows in a shadowy London church as the summer rain poured down outside. Plath carried a pink rose and a matching knitted suit-dress borrowed from her mother, with a pale pink ribbon as a hairband (see Part 1 here).
The problem with posing
In the formal studio photos of December 1956 there is little of this spontaneity or warmth. Both Ted and Sylvia are smartly turned out: Hughes is wearing a new tweed jacket, presumably purchased for his job as a teacher which had started a few weeks before, and his hair is neatly combed back. It’s likely that Plath is wearing the knitted pink suit dress that she wore for her wedding day, and her hair is held back with the same colour of ribbon.
Yet they now seem rather ill at ease with the idea of posing for such conventional portraits. Plath is trying hard, smiling charmingly, but her expression looks less than confident, while Hughes’s occasional thin-lipped smile is sardonic and gives the impression that he has been forced into the studio against his will. The photographs show nothing about how the couple themselves saw their relationship, as two poets who were planning an unconventional creative partnership, and everything about ‘putting on a show’ for the benefit of her mother’s middle-class friends in Massachusetts.
Did Lettice Ramsey, a talented and innovative photographer, deliberately produce conventional portraits, imagining it was the sort of thing an American mother might like, or was she following Plath’s own instructions? (Contrast Ramsey’s intensely romantic double portrait of John Cornford and Rachel 'Ray' Peters in 1934).
Survival
So what were Plath and Hughes to do with the photographs they disliked so much? Aurelia Plath must have shared their uneasiness, because during her lifetime most of the wedding photographs remained unprinted. The images that have been published in recent years are held by the Lilly Library at Indiana University, while the original glass plates of the photos remained in storage in Lettice Ramsey’s Cambridge studio until it closed in 1978 and the originals were sold on.
In 2013 the Plath scholar Gail Crowther spotted one of the ‘previously unseen’ images online, and contacted the studio’s current owner Peter Lofts, who gave her permission to publish them in an article she co-wrote with Peter K. Steinberg about Plath's archives.2
The re-emergence of these photographs from the archive continues to tell its own story. In July 2021, when Sotheby’s in London auctioned a large collection of items that had previously belonged to Frieda Hughes, Ted and Sylvia’s daughter, I noticed that among the items for sale was a print of one of Lettice Ramsey’s photographs of the couple. Although if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a black and white portrait of Ted Hughes, looking serious. The other half of the photograph, featuring a smiling Sylvia Plath, has been cut off, and the writing in capital letters on the back simply says ‘Ted Hughes, 1957’.
The Silent Woman’s 2020 cover, based on the photo above, is intended to remind us of the dissonance within the marriage of Plath and Hughes, and the book’s author Janet Malcolm is famously critical of the “dubious, unauthentic, suspect” ways in which journalists, biographers and academics have written about the couple. However, reading her book again, it’s clear that Malcolm’s sympathies lie with Hughes, and his wish for privacy. A recent book by
, Loving Sylvia Plath, features fresh revelations of Ted Hughes’ violence towards Plath and his wish to control how Plath’s posthumous story was told, and includes material from the Harriet Rosenstein archive which was sold to Emory University in 2020.Sylvia Plath’s story is still emerging from the shadows. Have a look at the recent paperback of Red Comet, which crops her smiling face more closely, while on the back cover the profile of Hughes is obscured and fades away into the darkness. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or not, but it seems fitting to me: let the focus be on Plath, and on her poetry. Let her tell her own story now, one that shines light on everything she achieved in her short life, and this time we should listen.
My thanks to Emily Van Duyne, Luke Bird, Lamorna Elmer, Di Beddow, Peter Lofts, Chris Murray and Gail Crowther for their advice and assistance. This is an expanded and updated version of a post that was first published on my Wordpress blog. I’m hugely grateful to
for his kind support, and for sharing this story more widely on The Substack Post in July 2024.
The wedding photos, part 1
This is the first of a double post about a set of photographs that came to light in recent years, and investigates how new information about Ted Hughes since 2020 informs our perception of them. I am republishing these posts to take this new research into acco…
NOTES
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Vintage, 2022)
Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg, These Ghostly Archives: The unearthing of Sylvia Plath (Fonthill, 2017)
Gail Crowther, Three Martini Afternoons at The Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (Gallery Books, 2021)
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (Faber & Faber, 1975)
Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volumes 1 & 2, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (Faber & Faber, 2017 and 2018)
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter K. Steinberg, Collected Writings of Assia Wevill (2021)
It is possible to buy personal copies of Ramsey & Muspratt’s photographs from Peter Lofts’s website here, and to pre-order Emily Van Duyne’s book here. Thanks to Pam B. for correction about Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana USA.
You can find my TLS review of Heather Clark’s and Janet Malcolm’s books here: Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘Let her be Ariadne: The brilliant, resilient Sylvia Plath behind the myth’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 2020 (£)
‘These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past’, I.U. ScholarWorks Journals, July 1, 2013.
Odd to have this story appear. I was Susan Weller's husband. Susan was Sylvia's roommate at Smith. We married in 1960 and lived in Berkeley California until 1963 after Sylvia died. I only met Ted and Sylvia twice. Ted in Berkeley when he came with the poet Gunn and in England when Susan attended a Gaudy at Somerville College in 1962. Susan was the first woman Marshal scholar graduating from Somerville with a PPE. We stayed several days with them in Devon. The children were young the girl 2 and baby boy about sux months.
These two posts were so interesting. Do you know where Hughes taught? (I taught at Parkside for a couple of years.)