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In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat to a Canadian poet and his wife, the beautiful, accomplished, and slightly mysterious Assia Wevill. Soon afterward, Ted and Assia began having an affair. Within a year, Assia was pregnant with Ted's child and Sylvia, after years of suffering from depression, had committed suicide. Six years later, Assia would do the same.
It's a horribly tragic tale, like something out of Shakespeare, with genius and artistic ambition and love and sex and poetry entangled with themes of power dynamics, infidelity, and mental health problems. The poetic gifts of Ted and Sylvia - and the tragic ending of their marriage, has kept biographers and essay writers busy. But what about the third woman, Assia Wevill, a successful professional with ambition of her own? What did she write? How did she fit into this triangle? In this episode, Professor Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter Steinberg, editors of The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill, join Jacke for a discussion of the "Other Woman" in the Plath-Hughes marriage.
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(A NOTE OF CORRECTION: At one point during this episode, the host mentions the years of Plath's birth and death and gives her age as "sixty." That should, of course, have been "thirty." While he does not regret the error, and has been railing against "sticklers" and yelling "come on, people, a slip of the tongue, my listeners know that happens sometimes!" all morning, we at the History of Literature Podcast certainly do regret the error. Please accept our apologies for his unique stupidity..)
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