The wedding photos, part 1

The Bloomsday wedding of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Studio photograph of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Ramsey & Muspratt, ©Peter Lofts Photography

It poured with rain on 16th June 1956, the day that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes got married at St George the Martyr Church in Bloomsbury, London. Plath and Hughes had chosen to marry on ‘Bloomsday’ to honour the Irish writer James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses (1922). The 18 episodes of the novel, mainly following Leopold Bloom’s odyssey on foot around Dublin, all take place on one day, 16th June 1904, the date on which Joyce first ‘walked out’ with his future wife Nora Barnacle.

Sylvia Plath also loved the work of James Joyce and wrote her dissertation on him during her final year at Smith College in Massachusetts, before she travelled to England on a Fulbright scholarship to study English literature at Cambridge. In London in 1956, even the rain increased her wedding’s romantic and literary associations. In a letter to her brother Warren, she describes 

standing with the rain pouring outsi…