Wednesday December 14, 2022 at 12:06pm
Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry,” Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary, half longing for and half fearing the return of Ted Hughes in 1956. Both poets used each other as material and fuel for incandescent, mythological writing. To write about their marriage is therefore dangerous – you’re competing with two of the greatest 20th-century poets. But it’s seductive nonetheless, and perhaps especially for novelists, because it’s such a novelistic story: two writers locked in a life-and-death struggle in a remote house; a mistress invited into the household by Plath herself, in a gesture at once self-destructive and unknowing.