Everything You Thought You Knew About Sylvia Plath Is Wrong

The #MeToo Story You Haven't Heard

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Even people who know nothing about poetry, or people who are wholly uninterested in poetry, have likely heard of Sylvia Plath.

This is because Plath was a brilliant visionary, yes. But it’s also because the lore surrounding Plath sometimes threatens to loom larger than either Plath’s work or Plath’s unique personal history. Much of what the general public knows about Plath stems directly from decisions made by her husband, Ted Hughes, after her death. Not only did Hughes make unauthorized editorial changes to her most famous book of poetry, Ariel, which fundamentally impacted public perception of Plath’s legacy, but he helped turn Plath into an unreliable narrator of her own story.

In Loving Sylvia Plath, Emily Van Duyne tells many stories. She tells the story of domestic abuse, of male entitlement, and the impossibility of claiming any singular truth about a single person or that person’s art, particularly when the winds of misogyny have so effectively muddied the waters for so long.

Loving Sylvia Plath was named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement and The New Yorker. Emily is an Associate Professor of Writing at Stockton University, in New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and three children. She is working on a book about sexual assault in higher education, and the history of Title IX. She also writes the Loving Sylvia Plath newsletter, which is a delight.

For me, Loving Sylvia Plath reads at times like a whodunnit; there’s an absolutely bonkers epistolary drama between Emily and a would-be Plath biographer threaded throughout that I’m still losing sleep wondering about. And it’s certainly a book for anyone who has ever loved Sylvia Plath. But it’s also a book for anyone who cares about women’s lives, or their ability to share their lives with others. It’s a book for anyone who has been gaslit. It’s a book for anyone who has been forced to shrink themselves in order to survive. And it’s indisputably a #Metoo book.

Sara: I’m going to start us off by telling you my Sylvia Plath origin story. In my senior year of high school English, we were told to choose a literary figure from a list and write about that figure. I chose Sylvia Plath knowing absolutely nothing about her. The first thing I read was not any of her poems, but this collection of her journals. I was instantly transfixed by this creative, curious, constantly questioning person. She was charismatic, interesting, and full of life. I related to her sense of yearning, but more than anything, I related to her as a girl determined to suck the marrow out of life. After reading this collection, I then learned about Sylvia’s reputation as one of poetry’s saddest of sad girls, and was frankly shocked. This reputation was so entirely at odds with the woman whose journals I had spent so much time with. I read some of her poems, which mostly went right over my head, but even if some of them felt vaguely dark to me at the time, I couldn’t understand why this bright, golden person had been reduced by history to this doomed, tragic figure. You write that “the world over understands her via the shorthand of cultural signs: a witch, a myth, a Zombie Queen heralding the darkness inherent to man–or, more accurately, woman.”

Please EXPOUND. I think this personal anecdote says so much about how Sylvia’s story has been coopted by others (cough cough Ted Hughes) and eagerly gobbled up by a fundamentally misogynist public. And it says so much about how easily women’s stories can be rewritten by people with ulterior motives.

Emily: Well, first of all, thanks for talking with me about this. It’s my favorite subject! By which I mean, not just Plath, generally, but the ways we come to her work and how her mythology is often embedded in that process. I love that you had this reverse introduction to Sylvia Plath, i.e., you read her journals as this vibrant expression of this vibrant person, and were shocked to learn the opposite was considered true, more generally, by the culture. It actually reminds me of a Plath story of my own– when her Unabridged Journals were published in 2000, I carried them everywhere on campus (I was a junior at Emerson College at the time), and once a fellow lit student said to me, “Who is that, on the cover?” And I said, kind of like, duh, “That’s Sylvia Plath” (the title of the book was obviously on the cover). And he said, “No way, I thought she was like, a goth girl!” The image on the cover is Plath as a senior at Smith College, with beautiful blond hair and this huge smile. And I just knew, even then– this is the great question I have to write about, this bad idea about who Plath is/was. Because Plath is, in some ways, quintessentially of her time, as in, of the 1950s– particularly in her look– and there was no such thing as a “goth girl” in the 1950s. And this kid was a bright, erudite literature student–he knew that. Yet somehow, there it was. The myth is powerful.

Sara: YES. And the myth is NOT coming from nowhere. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath are one of literature’s most famous (and infamous) couples, and I think there’s growing mainstream awareness of Hugh’s emotional and physical violence (towards Plath and others), but for a long time, he was this rugged Man Of Letters and Plath was the doomed, frail wife who was never quite as successful as he was. How was he instrumental in shaping the public perception of Sylvia Plath?

Emily: Anyone who tells you that Hughes was not the primary author of Plath’s mythology is either delusional or has not read the literature. The short of a very long story goes like this: when Plath killed herself in London, in 1963, she and Hughes were separated and she was seeking a divorce, as a result of his repeated infidelity and what she would have termed (and the courts would have termed) “marital cruelty.” But they were still legally married.

So, when she died “intestate” (without a will) he inherited everything she owned, including the copyright to everything she had ever written, both published and unpublished (note to writers: make a will). This turned out to be a huge volume of writing, some of which is still unpublished. The most important unpublished works, at that time, were Plath’s Ariel poems, which she had written mostly in the year prior to her death. She had finished the collection in November 1962, typed, ordered, titled, and dedicated the book, and was in the process of publishing the individual poems. Those poems were largely about a violent marriage and its violent end, and motherhood. Hughes found it, along with about 15 new poems, written in the last five weeks of her life; some were written in the last week of her life, like the poem “Edge.”

At that point, Plath had entered what her doctor would later call a “psychotic depression.” Hughes thought the “psychotic depression” poems were more impressive than the violent marriage poems (no surprise there!), and he removed a dozen of the marriage poems, replacing them with the poems from the end of Plath’s life. The book’s publication was accompanied by mysterious reviews about Plath’s “mysterious” death and the rumors began to fly. Hughes rarely spoke against them on the record, possibly because he valued his privacy and possibly because Plath’s image as a suicidal basket case was making him a lot of money– Ariel sold 15,000 copies in its first six months of publication in the UK, which is an outrageous number for a book of poems.

And that is essentially the origin of the myth, although there is obviously a great deal more to it. Combine the complicated and “messy” end of Plath’s life with the disastrous ways the legal system treats women during and after a divorce, Hughes’s mercenary nature, his desire to hide the violence of their marriage… it’s a recipe for a disaster, but one that reads appealingly to a public already primed for misogynistic takes on great women writers.

Sara: Clearly, throughout the years, Plath scholars (many of whom were women, many of whom identified as feminists) attempted to undo the narrative damage Hughes had done, but even then, it was so easy (for Hughes and others) to cast THOSE women as similarly unhinged and unhealthily obsessed with their subject. There are so many maddening layers to this story in which men ridicule and diminish women’s work, right?

Emily: This is actually one of the most fascinating elements of this “literary afterlife,” as I call it in the book. Somehow, in the 1970s, as Plath’s fame became meteoric as a result of the publication and fame of The Bell Jar in the US, Hughes and his contemporary, the critic Al Alvarez, managed to convince the public that it was feminist critics who had created the mythology of Plath as a suicidal priestess. There is actually a great deal of published literature and letters in which both men say this outright. The origin of this, really, is the poet and activist Robin Morgan. Morgan was well-established as a writer and critic, and in the early 1970s, she published a poem called “Arraignment,” in which she wrote, “I accuse / Ted Hughes / of … the murder of Sylvia Plath.”

Hughes’s sister, who was also his agent, got wind of the poem just prior to its publication and tried to block it; they failed, and when they did, they began a campaign to discredit Morgan as “crazy.” They also made bizarre claims– they told people that Hughes could no longer give readings in public because “crazy feminists” would show up at the readings and shout Morgan’s poem over him, reading. This got repeated, and repeated, until it became the accepted truth– poor Ted Hughes, victim of “rabid feminists” (that’s a real quote from the time). The problem is, as the scholar Janet Badia has painstakingly proven, this never happened.

There is not a single written or otherwise record of this ever occurring in real time, from the time period in which it was supposed to have happened. So, it’s a kind of literary DARVO– Morgan unearths startling research about Hughes (in the poem, she names the suicide of Assia Wevill, the murder of Shura Wevill, and quotes Plath’s letters about Hughes’s physical violence, which were then unknown and unpublished), writes a brilliant polemical poem about it as an act of protest, and suddenly, the narrative becomes: Ted is the victim, Morgan (an avatar for feminist Plath fans) is unhinged, and feminists have made a “martyr” of Sylvia Plath, a myth of her that bears no resemblance to reality.

Sara: There’s something interesting about how scholars’ (and fans’) appreciation of Sylvia Plath’s work has been so aggressively (and explicitly) feminized. I don’t think this necessarily happens with all female artists. For example, I don’t think Austen scholars and fans are somehow made to feel suspect for their love of and interest in Austen’s work. I think there’s also this idea that if your love for an artist’s work (if you’re a woman, and if the artist is a woman) stems at least partially from relating to their work, then your interest is not serious. Or it’s easily dismissable. But the fact is, so many women respond to Plath’s work because she DOES write about domestic violence and other issues more likely to impact women. In your book, you braid your own story throughout, which I like to think of as a sort of “fuck you” to the idea that a personal connection to your subject is like - bad - in some way. I wonder if you can talk about this? It’s a mess of a question, but hopefully you get the gist!

Emily: Well. It’s a mess of a question that I love. So, thank you for asking.

I’ll start with Austen, which is a great point of departure, here. I agree that Austen scholars do not suffer the same castigation that Plath scholars (and fans) do. But think about it like this– Austen writes works of genius that are always marriage plots. She illuminates the nuance and difficulty of human relationships when they suffer the social and cultural constraints of the time, but in the end, the women marry. Which, I mean– they should! The books are realistic portraits, which is what Austen intended them to be. But in that way, they are easily sanctioned by a culture invested in women getting and staying married.

Ariel (and, increasingly to me, The Bell Jar) is a book that stands to savagely critique marriage. It is not a marriage plot. It’s an end-of-marriage plot. It’s also not a “divorce book” that’s like, looking for love. It’s a book about many things, of course, but one of them is the harrowing question of simply surviving as a woman who lives out her intention of being a great artist. And who succeeds, actually.

And now we’re wading into the territory of Plath’s “literary afterlife,” again, but I think this is an important element of it. Because Plath’s work was not only a runaway artistic success, it was a commercial one. Which meant a lot of people were reading it, that it had real influence. Ariel starkly rejected the marriage plot society hands women– so, it was a threat. It had to be contained. And one way of containing the threat was to strip Plath of that power by casting her as weak, morally weak, for killing herself and “abandoning” her domestic duties of motherhood and marriage. In the book, I make this argument using Kate Manne’s ingenious framework that misogyny is a punitive tool of sexism–it demands that women be caretakers and when they step outside of that realm, they have to be punished. You can see this all over the early criticism of Plath and even, sometimes, now–she was weak, so she killed herself, she must be punished/contained.

Finally– telling women they are stupid and feminine and weak for loving Sylvia Plath is another arm of that same punishment. And telling women that they can’t love Plath because they recognize themselves in her life and work is the same, as well as being a potent form of gaslighting. If you tell me that my own experience of surviving a violent marriage to a violent poet has nothing to do with Plath’s life, then am I more or less likely to write my own work about that violent marriage? To leave that violent marriage? If we bait women into believing that Plath was, as I wrote in Loving Sylvia Plath, “always already an unstable liar” then we can bait them into disbelieving their own experiences of violence– or, at the very least, we can bait them into remaining silent about it.

Sara: That’s so beautifully said. We need to talk about Assia Wevill. I don’t think many people know about Assia. Or that she, like Sylvia, also died by suicide, or that Ted Hughes essentially made her live in Sylvia’s house after Sylvia died. And like Sylvia, Hughes also abused, gaslit, and mistreated Assia throughout their relationship. How did studying Assia’s story add to your understanding of Sylvia’s story, or: how did studying Assia’s story in the context of Sylvia’s story contribute to your understanding of epistemic injustice (as you put it in your book)?

Assia Wevill

Emily: What I realized, as I was researching the book, was that without knowledge of Assia’s life and death, Plath’s suicide seems anomalous. And without knowledge of Plath’s experience of intimate partner violence with Hughes, Assia’s suicide/filicide seem anomalous. But when you read them together– especially with stories from other women who were in relationships with Ted Hughes– it’s all a clear pattern of abuse and neglect.

The problem was that Hughes went out of his way to cover up not only Assia’s and Shura’s deaths, but their very existence. And he openly enlisted other people in this. I write about this in LSP, but there is a famous section of the New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm’s book, The Silent Woman, in which the poet and Plath biographer Anne Stevenson just outright says to her– Ted Hughes asked the poets not to talk about Assia and Shura to anyone, so we didn’t. She says– it’s actually quite chilling– You don’t say no to Ted. He always says, Please.

And I think this does act as a form of epistemic injustice, which is an idea and a term originated by the brilliant philosopher Miranda Fricker, who teaches at NYU. Because if you are a literary young woman, especially one with aspirations to write, then there is a strong chance you will encounter Sylvia Plath in your formal (and cultural) education about what it means to be a writer, what it means to be a woman writer, in particular. And if you are taught– if you begin to make knowledge– about Plath that says, Well, she was great, but she sacrificed her life at the altar of that greatness, those poems killed her, then you are being done an injustice in the way you produce knowledge about Plath and, therefore, women artists more generally. Because the truth is, you really don’t know anything at all about the conditions of Plath’s life, and the ways those conditions affected, sometimes dramatically, her production of art. And it turns out that marital violence is a vital part of that– and that Assia Wevill’s experience sheds great light on that knowledge.

Sara: One of the most surprising parts of the book (for me!) was the story of Harriet Rosenstein. You had a fascinating correspondence with her that ending (I won’t give it away because this part of the book truly reads like a whodunnit) that was utterly wild. Again, without any spoilers, can you give readers a little taste of who Harriet Rosenstein was and why she’s relevant to Plath’s story?

Emily: Oh yesssss, girl. Harriet Rosenstein is one of my favorite elements of Plath history! A better word might be lore, as my kids would say. The facts are that Rosenstein was a brilliant young academic who wrote her dissertation on Plath, at Brandeis University, in the early 1970s. She published part of it in Ms. magazine and became an overnight literary sensation. A bunch of editors offered her book contracts to write a biography of Plath; she signed with Knopf, and got a sizable advance. For seven years, she traveled all over England and the US talking with Plath’s friends and family, often recording the interviews on her reel-to-reel tape recorder. At some point, she seems to have stolen 14 letters Plath had written to her psychiatrist, which the psychiatrist entrusted to Harriet. Then, she defaulted on the book contract, and disappeared.

I only learned about Rosenstein when she tried to sell those 14 letters at auction, in 2017, and it became a literary scandal. Then, three years later, she sold her archive to Emory University. When the pandemic sent us into lockdown, Emory digitized her taped interviews and made them available to researchers. At which point I became a maniac, essentially– I was 40, unexpectedly pregnant, and suddenly Zoom/homeschooling my kids, so any chance I got, I would just hole up with my laptop and some headphones and relax to the smooth sounds of Harriet smoking Pall Malls with Plath’s psychiatrist, gossipping about Sylvia, circa 1971. I became slightly obsessed with knowing why she never wrote this book, and slightly obsessed with getting her to talk to me… readers can discover more about these obsessions in Chapter 7 of Loving Sylvia Plath. But more than that, I think Rosenstein’s papers tell us so much about how very little we really know about Plath’s life and the early attempts to turn that life into a biographical narrative. Fascinating.

Sara: Reading this book today, it’s impossible not to consider the ways in which the right is currently writing women’s stories. Women are sluts or bad mothers if they have abortions. They are criminals. They are immoral. The problem of men telling women’s stories is so baked into history.

Emily: I firmly believe that I wrote a #MeToo book. I did it on purpose. I believe in the power of women speaking individually and collectively about the conditions of their lives and the ways those conditions are shaped by a gross gender power differential that exists to violently control the lives of women. Plath was doing this in 1963. She was championed by women who were doing it in 1965, 1966, 1970… you see what I mean. She has always been a part of that tradition, and I think she always will be. Plath was characterized as bad, immoral, slutty, crazy by the men who had the power to silence and/or rewrite her story, and then, the feminist writers who took up her story on her behalf were also cast as bad, slutty, crazy, etc.

We have a right and a duty to talk about the conditions of our lives. Especially as white women in positions of relative economic and cultural privilege. If I have a platform, I believe it’s my duty to use it to tell the truth about my life, about Plath’s life, to constantly and diligently say, No, every time some conservative dickhead spews some bullshit about Ted Hughes being a saint or Plath being crazy or me being crazy. And in that way, I hope it opens doors for other people to be less afraid to speak about their own lives under patriarchy, or the lives of other historical women. I always return to that incredible line from Muriel Rukeyser– “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Or Audre Lorde– “Of what had I ever been afraid?” she asks in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” referring to the ways that fear of speaking the truth fell away when she learned she had breast cancer. In other words, we’re all going to die– fucking say the thing. You might save someone else’s life, if you do. You might save your own.