"He's Busy Espalliering Sylvia": Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Assia Wevill

Abstract:

Prompted by recent feminist recovery efforts, this essay traces and considers Assia Wevill (1927–1969) as a noteworthy woman writer, whose life and literary contributions were influenced and inspired by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and the former British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930–1998). Reflecting on the manner in which Assia has been understood as a femme fatale archetype, the article seeks to reframe our understanding of her life primarily and her work secondarily by foregrounding them in her own words. While Assia has conventionally been approached as an attendant figure in the biographies and poetry of Plath and Hughes, this piece maintains that her life and literary contributions provide material for literary scholars to engage with and make inroads in feminist scholarship, as well as to forge new pathways in Plath studies and Hughes studies. Increasingly more than a footnote to Plath and Hughes, Assia Wevill emerges as a relevant subject for scholars who wish to track and map gendered dynamics in connection with biography in twentieth-century literature and letters.