tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/ted-hughes-24547/articlesTed Hughes – The Conversation2023-02-08T16:13:33Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1994772023-02-08T16:13:33Z2023-02-08T16:13:33Z60 years since Sylvia Plath’s death: why modern poets can’t help but write ‘after Sylvia’<p>This year marks the 60th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death. Had Plath enjoyed the longevity of her poetry, she would have turned 90 in October 2022.</p>
<p>So significant was Plath’s contribution to modern poetry (her most recent biographer, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/441776/red-comet-by-clark-heather/9781529113143">Heather Clark</a>, describes her as “perhaps the best-known American woman poet of the 20th century”) that in a sense contemporary poets can’t help but write “after Sylvia”.</p>
<p>Plath’s literary fame only arrived after her death. The sole poetry collection published in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), had a print run of just 500 copies and her novel, The Bell Jar (1963), <a href="https://bookmarks.reviews/the-first-american-reviews-of-sylvia-plaths-the-bell-jar/">received lukewarm reviews</a> and never a bestseller in her lifetime. </p>
<p>Many poets of my own generation, schooled in the 1980s and 1990s, first encountered Plath’s work as teenagers. The Bell Jar and her posthumously published collection Ariel (1965) were either popular curricular texts, or likely to be recommended to precocious students by cool teachers.</p>
<p>Such was my own experience when I, tugging tatty sleeves down over my hands, confessed to a supply teacher that I “liked writing poetry”. Doubtless she wasn’t encouraging me to shoplift <a href="https://theliterat.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ariel-restored-edition.pdf">a copy of Ariel</a> the following weekend, yet after reading on the book shop carpet for a transfixed half-hour, that’s exactly what I did.</p>
<p>It is difficult to outgrow an influence like that. My own poem <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/no1_emily/status/1585282078362451970">Small Flame For Sylvia</a> was an attempt to stare that problem down.</p>
<h2>A complex literary foremother</h2>
<p>Plath looms large but often ambivalently in the literary imagination of contemporary poets. <a href="https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/after-sylvia">Poet Emily Berry</a> wrote of Plath in 2022: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We don’t forget we don’t forget</p>
<p>All night your stars blaze on the hill</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Relationships with literary foremothers (and fathers) may be equal parts <a href="https://www.felsemiotica.com/descargas/Bloom-Harold-The-Anxiety-of-Influence.pdf">tender and oppressive</a>. But the astonishing imagistic (poetry that favours precise imagery) linguistic and mythic energy of Plath’s work – to say nothing of her frank and unapologetic <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61170577.pdf">literary ambition</a> – freed women’s poetry from niceness and modesty.</p>
<p>It also emancipated <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-sylvia-plath/plath-and-contemporary-british-poetry/194732497D91F2662A0F23ABFE223D56">post-war poetry in English</a> more generally from the tired <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-sylvia-plath/plath-and-contemporary-american-poetry/E5BE900C011A4D873D72CA242C3C9FB2">gentility</a> of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/new-criticism">New Critical</a> and <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-1950s-english-literatures-angry-decade">Movement</a> approaches.</p>
<p>Plath did not live to see <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/prominent-feminist-poets-3528962">the Women’s Movement</a> – whose activism sought equal rights and opportunities for women – and was by most accounts <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10436920802107633?needAccess=true">no feminist in her lifetime</a>. But her poetry anticipated feminism’s assertion that <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/the-personal-is-political">the personal is political</a> in its insistence that domestic topics such as <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49008/morning-song-56d22ab4a0cee">night feeds</a> and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Sylvia_Plath.html?id=ki9bAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">beekeeping</a> could, through her art, be rendered as powerfully as any other subject.</p>
<p>The slow but steady turn from biographical to historical criticism of her work enables readers to consider some of her controversial imagery. This include the Holocaust, but also the atom bombs, in <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29479/fever-103">Fever 103°:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Greasing the bodies of adulterers / like Hiroshima ash.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And racial tension of the Cold War in <a href="https://allpoetry.com/poem/8498445-Cut-by-Sylvia-Plath">Cut</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The satin on your / Gauze Ku Klux Klan / Babushka.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such allusions raise difficult and important questions about what a poet’s acceptable frame of reference can be.</p>
<h2>Writing back to Plath</h2>
<p>The shadow cast by Plath over contemporary poetry may also be experienced as one of frank alienation. Her phrasing can disturb with sudden bombshells of casually racist language, including the N-word. </p>
<p>This language is challenged in poet Degna Stone’s essay <a href="http://sylviaplathanthology.com/">Lines that Jar</a>. Such powerful instances of “<a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203402627/empire-writes-back-bill-ashcroft-gareth-griffiths-helen-tiffin">writing back</a>” as Stone’s essay are a part of both Plath’s legacy and the necessary project of writers, readers and critics towards <a>decolonialising literature in English</a>.</p>
<p>It should be considered, however, that for every reader like Stone, there may be many others who feel repulsed or silenced by this facet of Plath’s work.</p>
<p>Part of the task of the contemporary poet is to take Plath’s stylistic brilliance forward into a new century in as many ways as possible, while addressing this complicated legacy – and to let the woman herself rest in peace.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199477/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tiffany Atkinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Sylvia Plath left behind a complicated legacy. Contemporary writers influenced by her work must juggle inspiration with some problematic imagery – as a poetry expert explains.Tiffany Atkinson, Professor in Creative Writing (Poetry), University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1738132022-02-14T13:19:39Z2022-02-14T13:19:39ZHow Sylvia Plath’s secret miscarriage transforms our understanding of her poetry<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445980/original/file-20220211-25-czkih1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=488%2C17%2C3108%2C1973&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sylvia Plath wrote a series of 14 intensely personal letters to her psychologist that were only recently uncovered.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photograph-of-american-writer-and-poet-sylvia-plath-on-her-news-photo/136200753?adppopup=true">Amy T. Zielinski/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2017, one of Sylvia Plath’s private letters, which had previously not been made public, included a startling revelation: Plath suggested that her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was responsible for the miscarriage of their child in February 1961. </p>
<p>Heather Clark’s recent biography of Plath, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220043/red-comet-by-heather-clark/">Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath</a>,” includes this new information. But no scholarship has yet to contextualize the painful event as a means to reinterpret two of Plath’s most autobiographical poems, “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Thalidomide.”</p>
<p><a href="https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/wjmille3/">As a scholar of 20th-century American poetry</a>, I teach Plath regularly in my university classrooms and direct graduate theses about her works. To me, this new biographical information, together with Plath’s drafts and journal entries, reveals how she channeled this painful experience into her poetry. </p>
<h2>Details of a miscarriage emerge</h2>
<p>From Feb. 18, 1960, to Feb. 4, 1963, Sylvia Plath wrote a series of 14 intensely personal letters to psychologist Ruth Beuscher. In the letters – which span the most volatile era of Plath’s marriage, writing and eventual suicide – Plath opens up about topics she didn’t discuss with anyone else. </p>
<p>Scholars learned about these letters only in 2017 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/11/unseen-sylvia-plath-letters-claim-domestic-abuse-by-ted-hughes">when they suddenly came up for auction, and a subsequent lawsuit</a> eventually awarded them to Smith College, Plath’s alma mater. </p>
<p>As Plath’s marriage dissolved – she and Hughes separated in September 1962 – she had no reason to protect Hughes any longer. On September 22, 1962, she wrote to Beuscher: “Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man in jacket and tie holding drink." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445975/original/file-20220211-21-1ocxp3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had a turbulent relationship.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/british-poet-ted-hughes-later-to-become-poet-laureate-at-a-news-photo/2667669?adppopup=true">Evening Standard/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As Clark explains in “Red Comet,” one day in early February 1961, Plath, who was four months pregnant, answered the phone at her home in Devon, England. It was the influential BBC personality Moira Doolan on the other line, and Doolan seemed startled to hear anyone but Ted answering. </p>
<p>To Plath, this response was evidence of an affair. She began tearing her husband’s writings into long strips. She broke a mahogany table that was an heirloom of Ted’s. Plath was furious that he could have been having an affair while simultaneously being, as she wrote, so “impervious” to the “innumerable little umbilical cords” that tied her to her unborn child and 10-month-old girl.</p>
<p>When Hughes found Plath in this rage, he began striking her repeatedly. Her unborn child, about four months along, died within days. Clark asserts the miscarriage likely took place on Monday, Feb. 6, 1961.</p>
<p>The two soon conceived again and their child, Nick, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/nicholas-hughes">was born on Jan. 17, 1962</a>. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/01/did-sylvia-plath-final-suicide-note-name-final-lover">Plath died by suicide</a> on Feb. 11, 1963, after having written the most important poems of her life during the six months before her death.</p>
<p>Most of these poems were eventually included in the collection “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariel-poetry-collection-by-Plath">Ariel</a>,” which was published posthumously in 1965. But only in 2004 did two of them – “Thalidomide” and “The Rabbit Catcher” – appear in an updated version. The former, known for its surrealistic imagery, was open to multiple interpretations. The latter was received as a poem that directly addressed <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tight-wires-between-us-on-difficulties-of-a-bridegroom-by-ted-hughes/">Ted’s infidelity</a>. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"962792217545986056"}"></div></p>
<p>While Plath addressed the topic of miscarriage in her radio play “<a href="https://archive.org/details/pacifica_radio_archives-BC0515A">Three Women</a>” and the poems “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49003/elm">Elm</a>” and “<a href="https://www.poeticous.com/sylvia-plath/parliament-hill-fields">Parliament Hill Fields</a>,” the poems in “Ariel” seem to substantively build off her own personal experience with losing an unborn child.</p>
<h2>A poem imbued with new meaning</h2>
<p>The once elusive “Thalidomide,” which was written after Nick was born, can now be read within the context of the emotional roller coaster of her miscarriage up through the birth of a healthy son.</p>
<p>Plath begins “Thalidomide” with the image of “O half moon.” In Plath’s handwritten drafts, <a href="https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/resources/1282">which are available at Smith College</a>, you can see that this image is the poem’s original title. </p>
<p>This moon is an omen for miscarriage. <a href="https://poetrysociety.org/assets/homepage/Jane-and-Sylvia.pdf">Letters Plath exchanged with poet Ruth Fainlight</a> reveal that Plath regarded this symbol directly animated by Fainlight’s poem “Sapphic Moon,” which is also about a miscarriage. </p>
<p>“Thalidomide” then graphically evokes the imagery of a lynching. Something has been dismembered to resemble a dark victim burned until its limbs are short and its face is “masked like a white.” The most profound analog is the Billie Holiday song “<a href="https://genius.com/Billie-holiday-strange-fruit-lyrics">Strange Fruit</a>,” and Plath alludes to the song when she writes, “The dark fruits revolve and fall.” </p>
<p>What about the poem’s title? There is no evidence Plath ever took <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfr088">thalidomide</a>, a drug developed in 1954 prescribed to treat several symptoms including nausea and anxiety in pregnant women. However, she likely would have read about the horrors of its side effects if taken during pregnancy, which surfaced in 1962 when researchers and doctors discovered that over <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/the-thalidomide-catastrophe-by-martin-johnson-raymond-g-stokes-and-tobias-arndt-review-a3880221.html">10,000 children</a> were born with missing or badly misshapen limbs to women prescribed the drug.</p>
<p>In the poem, Plath connects her experience with the fears of a pregnant woman taking thalidomide. She describes “indelible buds” and “knuckles at the shoulder-blades” arriving with only a “Half-brain.” Plath herself was four months through the nine-month term when she had her miscarriage.</p>
<p><a href="https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/resources/1282">Plath’s drafts</a> also offer a window into her inspiration and creative process. Before removing such direct references to her miscarriage, she originally describes it as “that abortion” and “big abortion.” It is a “sin that cries,” complete with imagery that describes a fetus “thin as an eyelid” with “the smell of perilous slumber.” </p>
<p>Just 11 months after her miscarriage, Nick would be born.</p>
<p>In one of her most haunting journal entries, <a href="https://www.docdroid.net/y8Q7FRW/unabjournsplath-pdf#page=650link">she describes</a> his birth: “I shut my eyes, so I would see and feel from the inside – a horror of seeing the baby before Ted told me it was normal.” </p>
<p>At the end of “Thalidomide,” Plath writes, “The glass cracks across, / The image / Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.” The imagery evokes a lightbulb that shatters, releasing mercury gas trapped within. </p>
<p>And just like that, the birth of a child replaces the toxic memory of a miscarriage.</p>
<h2>The rabbit died</h2>
<p>Two weeks before Plath started writing “Thalidomide,” on Oct. 14, 1962, the British newspaper The Observer published <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/3uhl25zicuux27n/Plath%20Observer%20Oct%2C%2014%2C%201962.pdf?dl=0">an article</a> about how the drug was being tested on pregnant rabbits to show how it caused deformities. </p>
<p>“The Rabbit Catcher” – which was originally titled “Snares” – immediately precedes “Thalidomide” in Plath’s version of “Ariel.”</p>
<p>For the knowing reader, the old-fashioned saying that hovers silently behind this poem is the phrase “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/10/17/rabbit-test-pregnancy/">the rabbit died</a>,” which comes from the fact that pregnancy tests from the 1920s <a href="https://oncofertility.msu.edu/blog/2010/08/mythbusters-oncofertility">involved injecting a woman’s urine into rabbits</a>. Many people mistakenly believed that an injection that killed the rabbit signaled a positive test. </p>
<p>Among “birth pangs,” a “hollow” and “a vacancy,” “The Rabbit Catcher” includes objects that resemble umbilical cords. Plath writes of “snares,” “Zeroes, shutting on nothing,” and “wires.” The line “I felt a still busyness of intent” was once read as anxiety over Ted’s sexual advances to others; it now reads as if Plath were reliving the process of delivering a lost child too soon. And the final line of the poem – “The constriction killing me also” – points to Plath’s feeling as if she, too, is dying. </p>
<p>The phrases from <a href="https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/resources/1282">Plath’s earlier drafts</a> are illuminating: “I was a flat personage,” it was “a clean killing,” and it was all “Final, like a bad accident.” </p>
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<p>Most potent of all, Plath writes in an earlier draft of what can be understood only as her portrayal of Ted’s reaction: “It might cause him a morning’s anger.” This line represents Ted as so emotionally shallow that the loss barely registers. </p>
<p>Is it any surprise that it was Ted Hughes who <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/12/sylvia-plath-s-ariel.html">removed these two poems</a> before “Ariel” was first published?</p>
<p>At the time, only he knew of the deep family trauma they probed. And only in the fully <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/ariel-the-restored-edition/oclc/54865217">restored 2004 edition</a> of “Ariel” did they appear as Plath intended.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/173813/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jason Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two poems that were originally excised from ‘Ariel,’ Plath’s seminal poetry collection, vividly channel the painful experience of losing an unborn child.Jason Miller, Professor of English, North Carolina State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/763532017-04-20T09:49:19Z2017-04-20T09:49:19ZSylvia Plath: just because she wrote about her life doesn’t mean it’s public property<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166049/original/file-20170420-20063-moibg8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Claire Nally</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sylvia Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes is the stuff of legend. Most literature students come into university with at least a passing knowledge of Plath’s emotive, highly charged poetry, as well as her sensationalised life with fellow poet Hughes. They know about Plath’s suicide in 1963, Hughes’s infidelity with Assia Wevill – and the overwrought passion of their initial meeting in 1956 which Plath describes in her <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/shop/poetry/9780571301638-the-journals-of-sylvia-plath.html">Journals</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me … kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Plath returned the favour by biting Hughes on the cheek: “Blood was running down his face … Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.” </p>
<p>Less visible is the responsibility that critics have to balance the pursuit of knowledge with an ethical perspective acknowledging that some things we cannot, perhaps should not, hold up for analysis. This is an imperative when the participants are deceased and no longer have a voice of their own – especially when they are survived by direct relatives. </p>
<p>Their daughter Frieda Hughes lives with the legacy of her illustrious but tragic family every day (her brother, Nicholas, committed suicide in <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/lonely-life-and-premature-death-of-nicholas-hughes-1652599.html">2009</a>), and has clearly articulated her opinion on public sensationalism in the poem “My Mother”, criticising the film Sylvia (2003):</p>
<p><em>They are killing her again.<br>
She said she did it<br>
One year in every ten<br>
But they do it annually, or weekly,<br>
Some even do it daily,<br>
Carrying her death around in their heads<br>
And practising it.</em></p>
<p>Much of my current research addresses how we treat the dead in literature and popular culture. We might ask ourselves about the relationship between poetry and ethics, more so when the subjects are deceased – how far is it ethically appropriate to map biographical issues onto a poet’s creative work? I think this is the most pertinent question in terms of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/11/unseen-sylvia-plath-letters-claim-domestic-abuse-by-ted-hughes">the recent rediscovery</a> of letters from Plath to her former therapist, in which the poet alleged domestic abuse at the hands of her husband, prior to her miscarriage in 1962. These are letters to a therapist, probably never intended for public consumption – certainly not for sale on the open market, though they were later withdrawn for <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/12/ted-hughes-widow-says-sylvia-plath-claims-domestic-violence/">legal reasons</a>.</p>
<p>If Plath was with us to articulate her story and give consent it would be another matter. And if Plath suffered domestic abuse, she and her family have my immense sympathy. But this should not be a source of endless sensationalist speculation. Hughes and Plath were difficult, talented people, but they are also someone’s father and mother.</p>
<h2>Confessional poetry</h2>
<p>Part of the critical dilemma is that Plath wrote confessional poetry: her life is intermingled with her verse. Famously, in <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/daddy">Daddy</a>, Plath sees Hughes as a father substitute, and ultimately a seductive, but dangerous and threatening figure: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw.”</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166053/original/file-20170420-20060-kcixxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">summonedbyfells via Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Her poem, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMG9sAtZdpg">The Rabbit Catcher</a>, has been read by critics such as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Critical_essays_on_Sylvia_Plath.html?id=QTBbAAAAMAAJ">Linda Wagner</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview14">Anne Stevenson</a> in biographical terms. All the descriptions of “gagging”, “tearing”, “blinding” register powerfully a physical constraint – and the opening line: “It was a place of force,” is often read as representing physical violence. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n13/elaine-showalter/slick-chick">The Haunting of Sylvia Plath</a> (1991) Jacqueline Rose says “force” is a highly ambiguous word but she also explains: “It is hard not to read this [poem] as Plath’s own diagnosis, her judgement, wise after the fact, of the dangerous pleasures she has allowed herself to enjoy.” Nonetheless, we need to be mindful of the impossibility of recovering an authentic and coherent account of this relationship – and nor should we want to. Likewise, Plath’s metaphorical (and contentious) association of Nazism with her father does not fit in with the facts of his biography.</p>
<p>Hughes’s publication of Birthday Letters in 1998, just before his death, broke his long silence about Plath and offered a passionate memorialisation of his first wife. This can be read as a corrective to those who had blamed him for her death, to the extent that her gravestone was repeatedly defaced, and his name removed. </p>
<p>But, until that point, Hughes was fiercely protective of his first wife’s memory – mainly because of their two children growing up in the literary spotlight. For this reason, critics have been plagued by fraught relationships with both writers’ estates, mostly recently in Jonathan Bates’s magisterial biography <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/11/ted-hughes-the-unauthorised-life-review-jonathan-bate-sylvia-plath-carol-orchard-assia-wevill">Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life</a> (2015), which was initially supported by Hughes’s widow, Carol, to be later withdrawn. However intellectually frustrating, ultimately a family has the right to protect the memory of their loved ones, even if that means a generation of readers remain unfulfilled, and the literary life left to posterity is incomplete.</p>
<h2>Whose life?</h2>
<p>Part of the reason why we feel such ownership over this material, I would speculate, is correlated not only with our notions of celebrity culture, but also, how far we have invested the Hughes-Plath marriage with paradigms inherited from 19th-century texts (comparisons with Wuthering Heights are fostered by both poets). </p>
<p>This does not mean the “peanut-crunching crowd” (as Plath referenced in “Lady Lazarus”) have the right to pore over every traumatic detail of what remains a private life. The dangers of this are apparent in Emma Tennant’s fictionalisation of the story, Sylvia and Ted: A Novel (2001), which one <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jun/10/fiction.tedhughes">one reviewer</a> described as “tasteless but also compelling”. Through the eyes of his mistress, Hughes is rendered as a philanderer who had an affair with a young babysitter, Kate Hands, which – as far as we know – is pure fiction, but which readers inevitably conflate with their “real” lives. </p>
<p>There is a problem with “adopting the stance of the gossip”, as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hGuJ15aGsfIC&pg=PA40&dq=ethics+literature+plath&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiD7_eOma_TAhUPI1AKHYYTAPQQ6AEIOzAG#v=onepage&q=ethics%20literature%20plath&f=false">Diane Middlebrook</a> identified in her work on the ethics of life writing – and this is especially the case with critical scholarship. This is not to say that critics should not rigorously explore the work of these writers, but rather, that their unpublished writing needs to be handled with delicacy and respect – the public has no entitlement to information of any kind, and does not own their memory.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76353/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire Nally has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Arts Council. </span></em></p>The poet’s letters to her former therapist will be published later this year. How far is this an invasion of her privacy?Claire Nally, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/685272016-12-02T09:47:16Z2016-12-02T09:47:16ZAfter years of scandal, Philip Larkin finally has a spot in Poets’ Corner<p>Philip Larkin, one of English poetry’s most recognisable voices, has been memorialised in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.</p>
<p>His ledger stone was unveiled on Friday December 2 alongside tombs and memorials commemorating some of the finest writers in English literary history, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and T S Eliot. The ceremony took place 31 years to the day since Larkin’s death. </p>
<p>This is an occasion foreseen by Larkin himself, whose place in Poets’ Corner would probably have been guaranteed had he accepted the Poet Laureateship in 1984. Larkin was touted for this role as early as 1972; on that occasion it went to John Betjeman, a poet he admired. When Betjeman died in 1984, Larkin was the obvious choice. He didn’t share the public’s enthusiasm, but was reflective about his place in literary history: “I think there will be a space for me,” he told his mother. </p>
<p>Although a household name – a rare thing in poetry – Larkin had spent three decades dodging attention. Reports of the so-called Hermit of Hull’s reclusiveness were exaggerated, but it’s true that he largely avoided public roles – and what role in British poetry is more public, more bardic, than the laureateship? Larkin wasn’t joking when he told one acquaintance: “I just couldn’t face the 50 letters a day, TV show, representing British Poetry in the ’poetry conference at Belgrade’ side of it all.” To Andrew Motion, a later Laureate, he wrote: “Think of the stamps! Think of the stamps!”</p>
<p>Having politely declined, Larkin knew he had gifted Ted Hughes – a poetic rival – a spot in Westminster Abbey. But when Larkin died the year after, he was already known as Britain’s “unofficial Laureate”. One obituary <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%E2%80%9Cthe+funniest+and+most+intelligent+English+writer+of+the+day%2C+and+the+greatest+living+poet+in+our+language%E2%80%9D+peter+levi&oq=%E2%80%9Cthe+funniest+and+most+intelligent+English+writer+of+the+day%2C+and+the+greatest+living+poet+in+our+language%E2%80%9D+peter+levi&aqs=chrome..69i57.2835j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">hailed him</a> as “the funniest and most intelligent English writer of the day, and the greatest living poet in our language”. Perhaps the spot unveiled in the Abbey was always his. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148270/original/image-20161201-25663-dbzz7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Poets’ Corner.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<h2>Posthumous scandal</h2>
<p>But this outcome wasn’t always so certain. Scandal in the 1990s threatened to obliterate Larkin’s reputation. The publication of a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-mr-miseryguts-philip-larkins-letters-show-all-the-grim-humour-that-was-a-hallmark-of-his-great-1558190.html">Selected Letters</a> in 1992, containing foul-mouthed tirades against women, ethnic minorities, and the working-class, was swiftly followed by Motion’s 1993 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jul/05/poetry.highereducation">biography</a>, which revealed Larkin’s heavy drinking, pornographic habits, and multiple infidelities.</p>
<p>Influential cultural critics rushed to denounce Larkin. Lisa Jardine <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/27/philip-larkin-love-hate-women">lambasted</a> his “Little Englandism”, boasting “we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English”. Tom Paulin spoke of Larkin’s “quasi-fascism”, and the “distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became”. </p>
<p>This was a troubling and hysterical reaction to biographical disclosures. However regrettable, Larkin’s bigotry was performative and insincere; much of his behaviour was also judged against puritanical moral standards. More pernicious was the reinterpretation of his work in the light of these new perceptions of his life. Bizarrely, poems hitherto loved for their humanity were suddenly dismissed as the eruptions of a bitterly prejudiced man. </p>
<p>Assessments today <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/27/philip-larkin-love-hate-women">tend to be less extreme</a>, but the way we think about Larkin is still jammed somewhere between celebratory and condemnatory impulses. The Philip Larkin Society has campaigned over many years for a Poets’ Corner memorial, but the previous dean rejected this on the grounds of Larkin’s agnosticism, and an unofficial policy requiring writers to be dead for 20 years. </p>
<p>As neither criterion prevented Hughes from being commemorated in 2011, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether other anxieties were at play. The current dean expressed a different view: “I have no doubt that his work and memory will live on as long as the English language continues to be understood.” His sentiment wisely refocuses attention on what matters most: the poetry.</p>
<h2>Poets’ Corner</h2>
<p>Poets’ Corner is one of the most famous areas of Westminster Abbey. The tradition of burying or commemorating the nation’s best writers there began in the 16th century, when a tomb was erected for Chaucer, buried in the abbey 250 years earlier.</p>
<p>English literary history is extraordinarily diverse, and scholars have subjected its canon – as both a concept and a holding place – to extensive critique since at least the 1980s. But as a reflection of literary history, Poets’ Corner is selective and partial, and it may be a long time before the south transept becomes less male and less white.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148399/original/image-20161202-25685-1fhlg5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Chaucer: commemorated because of his day job. Stained glass by Burne Jones, V&A, London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John W. Schulze/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But then it was never “designed”, and chance has played its part in the erratic evolution of this collective memorial as much as cultural conservatism. Chaucer, for example, was buried there because of his day job as clerk of works to the Palace of Westminster; that he wrote The Canterbury Tales had nothing to do with it. And while 2016 has been a year of Shakespearean saturation marking 400 years since The Bard’s death, 124 years went by before the most famous name in English literature entered Poets’ Corner. Larkin’s 31 years isn’t much compared to that. </p>
<p>Larkin’s emotionally ambivalent attitude to Christianity is surely not unique these days. In Church Going, one of his most magnificent works, the narrator finds himself “at a loss”, unable to accept religious “superstition”, or even explain why he visits the church. But something pulls him there nonetheless – perhaps because “so many dead lie round”. Larkin keenly felt his own relation to the poetic dead; a stone bearing his name now lies close to at least two writers he worshipped, Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence. There is much in Larkin’s work to suggest he would have been moved by this act of “awkward reverence”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Underwood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>One of English poetry’s most recognisable voices has been memorialised in Westminster Abbey.James Underwood, Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of HuddersfieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/542212016-02-05T21:36:56Z2016-02-05T21:36:56ZWhen writing biography, should any part of a life be off-limits?<p>Several years ago, Oxford professor and Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate decided to write a biography of the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Initially it seemed he had the support of Hughes’ widow, Carol Hughes – who had inherited copyright of her deceased husband’s writings, along with those of his more famous first wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. </p>
<p>Jonathan Bate embarked on his biography with great seriousness. Yet somewhere along the way, Carol Hughes became worried he was going to chronicle her late husband’s personal life, in addition to his poetic one. The result? In order to avoid a lawsuit, Bate was forced to give up all hope of being allowed to quote more than a token number of words from Hughes’ – or Plath’s – diaries, letters, manuscripts or jottings. He ended up contorting his original vision into a pretzel.</p>
<p>Bate recently published “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ted-Hughes-The-Unauthorised-Life/dp/0008118221">Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life</a>.” Now Janet Malcolm, the venerable journalist and essayist of the <em>New Yorker</em>, denounces Professor Bate in <em>The New York Review of Books</em> for daring to write openly about Hughes’ private and public life.</p>
<p>Malcolm’s review is full of insult and a kind of Victorian outrage in defense of Hughes’ second wife Carol, a nurse whom Hughes married in 1970. It’s meant to wound not just Bate, but all those who attempt to write about the private lives of major figures. </p>
<p>In fact, Malcolm adds to a rich tradition of censorship by those who have deemed themselves the arbiters of what can and can’t be written in biographies – even those of the dead.</p>
<h2>Tastelessness or truth?</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/11/ted-hughes-very-sadistic-man/">Malcolm’s review</a> is titled “A Very Sadistic Man” – a reference to the accusations of a distinctly sadistic, often violent and rapacious approach to adulterous sex that some of Hughes’ mistresses have detailed in recent years. Malcolm argues that Bate, by including these previously published anecdotes, has blown Hughes up “into a kind of extra-large sex maniac.” </p>
<p>Beyond Bate’s “tastelessness,” there is, she writes, “Bate’s cluelessness about what you can and cannot do if you want to be regarded as an honest and serious writer.” </p>
<p>Malcolm excoriates his “squalid findings about Hughes’ sex life,” and his “priggish theories about his [Hughes’] psychology.” </p>
<p>Moreover, she declares that it is “excruciating for spouses and offspring to read what they know to be untrue and not to be able to do anything about it except issue complaints that fall upon uninterested ears.” After having read only 16 pages of the 662-page biography, Carol Hughes put the book down and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/14/ted-hughess-widow-criticises-offensive-biography">released a statement</a> through her lawyer, saying she found the tome “offensive” – and demanded that Professor Bate apologize.</p>
<p>Malcolm claims that biographers should simply not be permitted to address the private lives of their subjects. </p>
<p>“If anything is our own business,” she declares, it is privacy – “our pathetic native self. Biographers in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’ family, if not his shade, deserves better.”</p>
<h2>The beautiful and the base</h2>
<p>Impertinence? Biography has been here before. For thousands of years, the genre – like great fiction – has been contested.</p>
<p>And dating back to Suetonius and Plutarch, there have been almost endless examples of its antithesis: anti-biography, and attempts at censorship.</p>
<p>The Roman historian Suetonius was, it is believed, exiled from Rome for daring to research and write his “De Vita Caesarum,” or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Twelve-Caesars-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140455167">Twelve Caesars</a>. British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh was executed, in part for having annoyed King James I by his impudence in his “<a href="http://clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/bannedbooks/entry3.html">History of the World</a>.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110487/original/image-20160205-18277-1sgx8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Lady Bird Johnson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Lady_bird_1990.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lady Bird Johnson <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/arts/an-lbj-feud-finally-ends-johnson-s-library-and-robert-caro-make-up.html?pagewanted=all">took exception</a> to Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, refusing to speak to him for decades after Caro portrayed Johnson as something of a sexual and political monster in his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/21/books/up-from-texas.html?pagewanted=all">first volume</a>. As a result, Caro was not allowed to speak at the presidential library, a federal archive – and the papers he wished to see were withheld until 2003.</p>
<p>We should not be surprised, however, that Malcolm has chosen to attack Hughes’ posthumous biographer – for Malcolm’s review of Bate’s book reprises her infamous attack on biography while Ted Hughes was alive.</p>
<p>Twenty-two years ago, Malcolm wrote a series of <em>New Yorker</em> articles that became a book – “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Silent_Woman.html?id=AYf6htmLiaEC">The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes</a>.” </p>
<p>There, she openly challenged biographers and readers of biography with the argument that private life should henceforth be off-limits. </p>
<p>“The biographer at work,” she wrote in 1993, “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”</p>
<p>She refused to accept that there was more to biography than a pretense “of scholarship.” In her view, biography was simply about scandal, with biographers no more than peeping toms “listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.”</p>
<p>Those of us who knew anything of the history of biography were appalled, even then, that Malcolm would so disregard the words of the great 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson, the father of modern biography. </p>
<p>Johnson had decried the stilted approaches to life writing of his own time by mocking whitewashed accounts that failed to get behind the public facade. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MeyfRrhyQc8C">As he put it</a>, “more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative.”</p>
<p>The greatness of biography, according to Johnson, was in tackling “the beautiful <em>and</em> the base,” and in embracing “vice <em>and</em> virtue,” rather than relying on the “sober sages of the schools.” </p>
<p>His most famous put-down of the puritanical approach to biography was to his own biographer, James Boswell. If a man wants to indulge in a spotless eulogy or “Panegyrick,” he told Boswell, “he may keep vices out of sight, but if he professes to write <em>A Life</em> he must represent it really as it was.”</p>
<h2>Is the journalist’s goal to protect or reveal?</h2>
<p>Why, then, has Malcolm been crusading against serious biography which embraces both the beautiful and the base for more than 20 years? </p>
<p>Malcolm claimed she had spent years interviewing and corresponding with serious biographers for her Plath project, “The Silent Woman.” Why, as a professional journalist, was she content not to interview Hughes himself, or even speak to those men and women who actually <em>knew</em> the real Ted Hughes? What kind of a journalist is that?</p>
<p>In her new review, Malcolm pours scorn on Professor Bate, but she fails to reveal that in her earlier book, she’d defended Ted Hughes against the many biographers attempting to reveal the truth about him, and about the tragic story of Plath’s suicide. </p>
<p>In Malcolm’s view, Hughes had every right to use libel, property and copyright laws to protect his reputation as a husband and a poet by threatening legal action against anyone who snooped – or threatened to spill the beans – about his louche, often manic private behavior.</p>
<p>Though the law of libel ceased its protection of Hughes upon Hughes’ death 18 years ago, Professor Bate’s book has aroused Malcolm to new fury. Now she is determined to defend the second Mrs. Hughes; no snooping, revelation or even literary criticism of her late husband without her inherited copyright authority – and certainly no revelations of what Hughes was doing on the night of Sylvia Plath’s suicide.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/110505/original/image-20160205-18289-1xsrhw3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/summonedbyfells/12592779424">Freddie Phillips/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>As in her “Silent Woman” articles and book, Malcolm once again declines to question this utter misuse of copyright. (The world’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne">first copyright act</a> was originally passed in 1710 to protect income, not reputation, for a maximum of 14 years – and especially not to protect posthumous reputation.)</p>
<p>With continuous, almost annual lawsuits and moves <a href="http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/copyright-ip/2486-copyright-timeline#.VrUA2Euvv8s">to amend copyright law</a>, the battle between “authorized” and “unauthorized” biographies will thus go on, more than half a century since Plath’s death, and almost two decades since Ted Hughes’. Any “unauthorized” biographer of either Plath, Hughes or both must continue to write with his or her arm tied behind the back, unable to quote more than a few authentic words without Carol Hughes’ express permission. </p>
<p>Samuel Johnson would be appalled. And it would be a sad day for biography if Malcolm’s injunction were to be followed, given the major contributions to critical interpretation, history and memory that the genre has become in the many centuries since Suetonius.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/54221/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nigel Hamilton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>After Jonathan Bate, in his recent biography of Ted Hughes, wrote about Hughes’ salacious sex life, a number of critics – including Janet Malcolm – were quick to pounce.Nigel Hamilton, History and Biography, UMass BostonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.