Ted Hughes: Understanding The Severity Of Mental Health Through Sylvia Plath And Assia Wevill’s Suicides – And Why He’s Not Actually To Blame For Their Deaths

The past couple of blog entries have heavily discussed widowhood. It somehow made its way as a subject matter. It wasn’t initially supposed to be that way as myself don’t have experience (thank f*cking goodness) in that regard, so I didn’t feel I had much to say about it. Experiencing this heartache is indescribable. ‘Widow. The word consumes itself,’ Sylvia Plath, a writer, once said. Ironically, it was her husband, Ted Hughes, who became a widow when she unalived herself in 1963 at the age of 30. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life and was treated multiple times with early versions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Sadly, it didn’t work. They had two children together. At the time of Plath’s death, she and Hughes were separated as he left her for another woman, Assia Wevill, who was also a poet. At the time of Plath’s death, was pregnant with her and Hughes child, but had an abortion after Plath’s suicide. They later had a daughter in 1965, Shura. The couple were together for 7 years until she unalived herself in 1969. She also murdered her daughter with her in a murder-suicide.

In her suicide note, which she wrote two months before her and her daughter’s deaths, she wrote, ‘I have lived on the dream of living with Ted—and this has gone kaput. The reasons are immaterial. There could never be another man. Never.’ Ted Hughes had an affair with Carol Orchard and married her 1970. They stayed together until Hughes passed away of a heart attack in 1998. Sadly, Nicholas Hughes, Ted Hughes’ son with Sylvia Plath also committed suicide in 2009 at 47 years old. It’s a tragic tale. He was only a year old when his mother unalived herself. But that doesn’t matter. Children whose parents have committed suicide – doesn’t matter when and at what age – tend to feel not only responsible for their parent’s depression and ultimate suicide. They also feel profoundly rejected by them. The parent who kills him or herself is perceived by the child as not loving them enough to want to live. Any close relationships that might arise subsequently are fraught with trauma, insecurity, and dread. Ted Hughes, also a writer, wrote of his son’s grief following his mother’s death, ‘Became wet jewels,/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair.’

It’s a tragic tale of love lost, but not in the way that one might think. Though Ted Hughes had suffered a lot of loss in his life in such a manner as suicide, it’s hard to feel sorry for him. In a way, he was the root cause for the two of the three women in his life to have committed suicides. Sylvia Plath once told a friend of hers, ‘Ted is the only man I could never boss; he’d smash my head in.’ No one ever knew the extent of the abuse that Plath had endured at the hands of Hughes, but it was enough for her to miscarry. The one person who knew was her psychiatrist, as she wrote letters to him describing the abuse. My previous post highlighted the widowhood of Allison Holker, who was married to dancer and ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ DJ, who committed suicide in December 2022. Just like Plath, he left children behind in his death. The argument in the blog entry was the analysis of whether Holker was the face of widowhood or if she was profiting from her deceased husband’s death. Many of Boss’s immediate family and friends blamed Holker for his suicide and even said that he’d still be alive today had it not been for her.

It’s hard for me to say whether it’s actually true or not. But what I can say for certain is that while Holker attempted to make herself as the face and brand of widowhood, she proved her to have used tWitch’s death for her own financial gain, and I heavily discussed and explain it in detail in my previous blog entry. Following Plath’s death in 1963, Hughes said to his friend, ‘That’s the end of my life. The rest is posthumous.’ It almost sounds poetic. Despite his sorrows, Hughes destroyed his ex-wife’s journals following her death. According to him, it was so that his children didn’t find them in the future. No one will ever know whether it’s true or not. Maybe it was actually for as to no one finding out that he’d abused his deceased wife…

When asked how she felt following Plath’s suicide, Wevill simply replied that she felt nothing as it had nothing to do with her. She was even seen sleeping in Plath’s bed. Despite her odd behaviour following her lover’s ex-wife’s death, she took the responsibility of helping care for her lover’s two small children. And that’s even for the fact that she never wanted to be a mother in the first place. She moved into Plath’s place with Hughes and his children, and oddly enough, was using Plath’s things in her everyday life while insisting that it was out of practicality rather than for obsession.

This eventually took a toll on Wevill’s life, as she constantly felt like she was living in her lover’s deceased wife’s shadow. She and Hughes never really lived together as united family. Instead, it seemed as though he merely used her to be his children’s nanny. He’d often abuse her and give her exact instructions on how to raise his two children while he was away either working or having sexual relations with other women. Wevill’s herself wasn’t a saint in that department. She was involved with other men as well, but her plans always involved to come back to Hughes. Unlike her, Hughes never seemed to care much for her as his partner. To be clear about the matter, it wasn’t that he didn’t care about the woman that stayed home to be with his children that weren’t even hers to begin with, but rather that he couldn’t make up his mind.

While Hughes was away having relations with other women, Wevill with her husband, David Wevill. While she stayed in her lover’s deceased wife’s home all alone with his children, Assia invited David to stay with her there. While he was there, she got pregnant. And as she was still very much committed to Hughes, she claimed the child to be his. She had her daughter in 1965. Though she and Hughes stayed together and they lived as a family of 5, there was a drastic difference between how Hughes treated his children with Sylvia Plath and his child with Wevill. It was as if he never fully believed that the child was really his.

Hughes eventually had his parents move in to the place he shared with Assia and their 3 children after his mother became ill. Assia didn’t get along with Hughes’ parents, and after a particularly bad fight between the two women, Hughes took his mother’s side and had Assia and their shared daughter, Alexandra (nicknamed Shura) move out to a different place. They would still see each other on an occasional level, but they weren’t together as a couple. Assia didn’t take her new life with her daughter well and fell into a deep depression. Eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore and made plans to unalive herself. She also made plans to unalive her daughter.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her daughter and it wasn’t that she didn’t think her deserved to live. It was that her daughter had absolutely no one except for her, and Assia didn’t want her daughter to end up alone with nowhere to go but foster care, a place Assia didn’t want for Shura to end up in, and assumed that Sura was too old to be adopted at 4 years old. She knew Hughes wouldn’t take care of Shura as his own, and she didn’t have any stable friends to leave her with because she moved around so much throughout her life. And so with all that in mind, she made a decision that if she was going to unalive herself, she’d unalive her daughter as well. In her diary, Aissa wrote, ‘Execute yourself and your little self efficiently.’

Assia made an entire plan for the execution, and it had to be the same exact way as Sylvia Plath’s way – something that was sometimes described as a ‘copycat suicide’. On March 23, 1969, Wevill took her own life and the life of her daughter by carbon monoxide poisoning. She moved her bed into the kitchen, crushed a large amount of sleeping pills, dissolved them into a glass of whiskey for herself and water for Shura, sealed the doorways of the house and turned on the oven. The mother and daughter fell asleep before succumbing to the poison. They were found the next day by Shura’s nanny.

At the time, such a way to unalive one’s self was very common. Ovens then used coal, while modern ovens use natural gas. The US started utilizing natural gas ovens in the 1940’s, while UK, which was where Sylvia Plath, Assia, and Shura died, took another 30 years to do so. While the death count was as countless in such a manner, it’s quite eery that both Sylvia and Assia died in such a manner of death. Though it might’ve been a coincidence, Assia might’ve decided to end her own life and the life of her daughter the same way as Sylvia deliberately, for as to have a connection to Sylvia. She was already living in Sylvia’s home, using her belongings, and sleeping with her husband. Assia even wrote about Sylvia’s ghost haunting her, and that it was what made her choose to do what she did.

Following Assia and Shura’s deaths, not much coverage was made on them. Only one small local newspaper wrote anything of Assia’s passing, though not many details were included, and the story was placed at the bottom of the page under an article about luxury flats. It read, ‘Mother-girl inquiry opens. Poet and author Ted Hughes gave evidence of identification at Southwark on Tuesday.’ And it was as if the world, along with Ted, wanted to forget of Assia and Shura’s existence, even though Assia was an artist, just like Ted and Sylvia, in her own right. Assia even illustrated one of Hughes’ books, though it was never published. With the exception of those that knew and loved her, no one really knew of Assia’s death, and no one knew that she’d actually murdered her daughter. When Hughes was called to court, he referred to himself as a ‘friend of the wissels’. He never acknowledged Shura as his daughter, even after her death. He told his sister, but made her promise not to tell anyone. The news crushed her, so much so that when her and Ted’s father asked her what was wrong, she had to tell him. Their mother died 3 days later.

In the years that followed, Ted Hughes never spoke of Assia or her daughter. He treated them as if they were erased from his life completely. In 1990, however, he released a series of poems. One poem, in particular, gave a deep look into the last time he ever saw Assia alive just 3 days before she was cremated. In 1974, he published the poem, ‘Snow and Snow’, which could also be interpreted as being about Assia’s death. It read in part:

‘Snow is sometimes a she, a soft one. Her kiss on your cheek, her fingers on your sleeve. In early December, on a warm evening. And you turn her, saying, ‘It’s snowing!’ But it is not. And nobody’s there. Empty and calm.

Sometimes the snow is a he, a sly one. Weakly he signs the dry stone with a damp spot. Waifish he floats and touches the pond and is not. Treacherous-beggarly he falters, and taps at the window. A little longer he clings to the grass-blade tip getting his grip.

Then how she leans, how furry foxwrap she nestles. The sky with her warm, and the earth with her softness. How her lit crowdy fairy tail sink through the space-silence. To build her place, till it twinkles in starlight – Too frail for a foot. Or a crumb of a soot.’

Though Hughes didn’t directly have anything to do with Assia and her daughter’s deaths, he certainly did play a pivotal role in Assia’s decision. He suffered a lot of loss in his life and showed a sincere remorse for his wrongdoings and bad decisions that cost the lives of others. In the years since Hughes’ 1998 death, his daughter, Freida, and widow, Carol Orchard, spoke very highly of him. Freida labeled her parents’ love story as extraordinary, and Orchard had written a memoir about her 28 year marriage to Hughes. Numerous books were written about him since he died, and as she said herself when explaining why she decided to write a memoir on the marriage, no one really knew Ted like she did, so as to clear his name.

In the eyes of feminism, Hughes was seen as a murderer. In a 2015 interview with BBC, his daughter Frieda labeled the public’s treatment of her father as abuse in itself. She said, ‘I was appalled that something that happened in 1963 could be carried forward. What an easy way out for somebody to think, ’Yes, we’re right, we have got the real story, we know what really happened, and we are going to punish this complete stranger for something we weren’t around to witness, we know nothing about, but we’re the ones with the answer.’For outsiders – because that’s what they are, outsiders – to make judgments that affect somebody in their life, for all of their life, is a sort of horrible form of theft. It’s an abuse.’

Though she never claimed herself to be one, Plath was very much the face of feminism in the 1960’s. Her book, ‘The Bell Jar’ which was released only a month after her passing, heavily criticized women’s social status in the 1950’s. She explored what it meant to be a woman in an unequal world – and this is why she is considered a feminist icon as well as a brilliant poet. The book was the expression of the funny, smart, intense frustration with what it was like to be a woman during that time, which is why it’s a classic which still feels absolutely contemporary. In hindsight, the book is still somehow relevant for women even in today’s world. Though it was a massive hit, it was considered to be controversial amongst its readers.

In the book, Plath wrote, ‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked […] as I sat there, unable to decide [which fig], the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.’ Though a fictional book, it’s also semi-autobiographical and based on Plath’s own feelings of despair at the time of writing the novel. She was clinically depressed, and she was depressed long before Ted Hughes left her for another woman. So was Assia Wevill. She’d attempted suicide long before she even met Hughes in the first place, and just like she put the blame for her decision to take her own life as well as her daughter’s on Ted in her suicide note when she succeeded, she put the blame on her husband at the time when she failed too. Plath had also attempted suicide before she eventually killed herself in 1963. David Wevill also attempted suicide when Assia left him for Ted.

Let’s be clear: Ted Hughes wasn’t a nice man. He wasn’t a kind man. He wasn’t a good man. He was an abuser. He was lying, cheating scum. But it wasn’t his fault for Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill’s suicides. He wasn’t responsible for their decisions to end their lives. No one is ever to blame for another person’s decision to end their life. That is, unless someone actually encourages the other person to end their own life. That’s not anything that Ted Hughes actually did to neither Sylvia Plath nor Assia Wevill.

There’s a quote on suicide by Father Ron Rolheiser that I absolutely love:

‘What needs to be said about all of this: First of all, that suicide is a disease and the most misunderstood of all sicknesses. It takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Second, those left behind need not spend undue energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might still have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with any sickness, we can love someone and still not be able to save that person from death.’

Fran Lebowitz, also a writer, once said, ‘If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.’ By no means do I believe that someone committing suicide is poetic. But I also don’t think it’s a selfish act. I’ve suffered from depression. I’ve had suicidal thoughts. And I have attempted suicide. And I can tell you for certain that suicide IS, in fact, a disease. For me, it was my son that kept me going and made me want to stay in this world. But for someone to be so emotionally unwell that they choose to end their life knowing they’re leaving their children behind is unbearable for me to even think about. I just can’t imagine what must’ve gone on in their minds; in the minds such as that of Sylvia Plath. And believe it or not, Assia Wevill too. She murdered her daughter not because she was a bad person and a murderer, but because she didn’t feel that there was any other choice but the one that she made for her daughter.

I’d recently come across a woman who had a daughter with a disability. Her daughter had recently been diagnosed. She considered suicide; a murder-suicide, just like Assia Wevill. She felt defeated in her daughter’s new diagnosis. No one would’ve been able to take care of her daughter had she been gone from the world, so she thought having her daughter be gone with her would be beneficial to her and for everyone else. It was one person – just one person – who talked her out of the act and convinced her to keep going. It wasn’t that the other person talked to her, but that the other person knew exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. But Assia didn’t have that. She didn’t have a village. She didn’t have people around her she could talk to. All she felt that she had was Ted Hughes, and he didn’t want her; not in the way that she wanted him to be, anyway.

Richard Lipsey, Wevill’s first husband described his marriage to the starlet as tumultuous. In a personal essay published on his website, he wrote, ‘I will not say more about my first marriage except to note that the name of my first wife will convey to many that the word ‘tumultuous’ is not an over dramatization.’ Wevill was tumultuous person. Of her time with Hughes during the last 6 years of her life, Wevill wrote in her journal, ‘What, in 5 years time will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I? how much time have I been given? how much time has run out? What have I done with it? have I used myself to the hilt, already? am I enough for him? AM I ENOUGH FOR HIM?’

Assia was a beautiful woman. Sylvia was too. And yet, none of it was ever enough for Hughes. Soon after Hughes left Sylvia, he wrote to his brother, ‘It was cruelly unfortunate that the one woman Sylvia envied for her appearance should happen to get tangled up in my departure. That hurt her more than any other thing.’ He was cheating on Assia too. Throughout their relationship, he involved himself with at least three other women—the poet Susan Alliston, a married woman named Brenda Hedden, and Carol Orchard, his eventual wife of 28 years, who was 20 years his junior.

‘What has astounded me is my reaction to [Ted’s] departure, and to my decision to get a divorce as fast as I can. I felt the most fantastic exhilaration & relief.

In the last 3 years I have produced & nursed two children, had a miscarriage [in February 1961], and been so intrigued & delighted by my bodily processes & infants I have been out for the count. Also, my relation to Ted was in many, many ways, gravely regressed, more & more I was calling on him to be a father.

After I drove him to the station with his things, I returned to the empty house expecting to be morbid and huge with gloom. I was ecstatic. My life, my sense of identity, seemed to be flying back to me from all quarters.

I knew what I wanted to do, pretty much who I was, where I wanted to go, who I wanted see, even just how, when I get to a good London haircutter, I wanted to do my weird hair. I was my own woman.

Now I get up at 4 every morning & write like fury till 8, stuffing the babes with rusks & juice. I am doing a poem a day, all marvellous, free, full songs.

I think my marriage, though it had much good, was a pretty sick one. Ted has reverted to pretty much what he was when I met him — ‘the greatest seducer in Cambridge’, only now it is ‘the world’.

Even in love with this barren ad agency writer [Assia] who commands a huge salary & puts it all on her back, he picks up Finns in coffee bars & takes them to hotels — he & this Assia are such a perfect match I laugh in my guts when I think of them married.

They look exactly alike: the same color, shape, everything. She is his twin sister, & like his sister, barren, uncreative, a real vamp. All sophistication. They smoke (Ted, a non-smoker, has been desperately practising) & drop names of the opposite sex, to titillate each other. They will be elaborately unfaithful to each other, very rich, & have no children, I presume, if her 2 abortions & 4 miscarriages can let me have this satisfaction.

I suppose it will be hell for me to meet them together at my first party or literary affair. But I will.

Oddly, I think some day she & I may be friends, not friends, but speaking. Ted says she has got my book out of the library, adores my work, etc. etc.

His stay here before the final departure almost killed me. I have never felt such hate.

He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money & Frieda, told me I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love he had never told me, and even two years ago he had not wanted to live with me.

Why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged!

He told me London was death to him, got me down here [to Devon] hand-hemming curtains & painting furniture for a year hoping to see him radiant with what he wanted, & he seemed to be, then pouf!

Two years of hypocrisy, just waiting for the right bed to fall in? I can’t believe it. It just seems insane to me.

Ted is on the brink of real wealth. His mss. sell for $100 a poem, just the handwriting. He is at the peak of fame. I was scrimping 6 years for this, balancing check books, dying for first nights, trips, dresses & a nanny. His family wants him to give us nothing. He has left me no address.

I hope time may mellow him toward the children, but I doubt it. His ethic is that of the hawk in one of his most famous poems, being taught to all British school-children: I kill where I please, it is all mine. He was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!

Just tell me where all this hate comes from? He says he thinks I am ‘dangerous’ toward him now. Well, I should think so!

I see, too, that domesticity was a fake cloak for me. My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well. I can give a floor a beautiful scrub, cook a fine pie, deliver a baby with ease, and stitch up a nightgown.

I also love hanging out a clean laundry in the apple orchard. But I hate doing housework all, or much of the time. I have been running a 103 fever out of sheer mad excitement with my own writing.

I am ravenous for study, experience, travel. I love learning how to manage things — I have kept bees this year, my own hive, & am very proud of my bottled honey, & my stings. I am learning to ride horseback & the riding mistress is delighted, I am a natural. My mind is dying of starvation here.

And I am tied by nothing but money. And the sense my husband wants to kill me by cutting it off altogether, so I am hogtied & can’t work. It’s enough to make any woman sail to Lesbos!

What I don’t want is a nice, safe, dull, sweet reliable husband to take Ted’s place. He has to marry again — who’ll cook? And what a showpiece for looks he’s got!

But me — my independence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to anyone again. Most men who are domestic are dull — I hate routine jobs, and most men who are creative or scientific miracles are bastards.

I don’t mind knowing a bastard, or having an affair with a bastard, I just don’t want to be married to a bastard. I suppose it sounds as if I think all men are bastards, I don’t, but the interesting ones I would rather have as either friends, lovers or both, than husbands.

Faithfulness, the ethic of faithfulness, is essentially boring. I see that. Ted made much better love while he was having these other affairs, & the tart in me appreciated this.

But I also just haven’t the time to be married to a philanderer. That bores me too. There is so much else besides sex. I want my career, my children, and a free supple life.

I am so happy, everything intrigues me. It is as if this divorce were the key to free all my repressed energy, which is fierce from six years of boiling in a vacuum.

After 6 years of having only one man attract me as much as Ted — what I wouldn’t give to see him now! — I am again interested in other men, but few men are both beautiful physically, tremendous lovers & creative geniuses as Ted is. I can’t even imagine anybody ever making me feel passionate enough to have an affair, after him. And I am so bloody proud & particular.’

This was one of the last letters that Sylvia Plath wrote to her psychiatrist before her death. It was a poetic, bittersweet, somber goodbye. She wanted to move forward with her life following her husband’s betrayal. She was desperate to do so. But the pain was just too unbearable. And though Assia continually said publicly that she didn’t care about Sylvia’s demise as it had nothing to do with her, the pain became a paralysis to her emotions. All she wanted was to be loved by the one man who couldn’t her his all. But again, no one is ever to blame for the deaths of Sylvia, Assia, and Sura other than the disease that is suicide. A diagnosis of trigeminal neuralgia (TGN), commonly nicknamed, “Suicide Disease,” means unpredictable bouts of severe pain that makes everyday living unbearable. Every aspect of life becomes shrouded in currents of unrelenting shocks to the face, causing both physical and mental anguish.

In my previous post, I heavily discussed Allison Holker and her role in her husband’s 2022 death. His family went as far as blaming her and labeling her as the root cause of his suicide. As much as I dislike her, I wouldn’t say she’s the cause of her husband’s suicide. However, she has shown that she’s using her husband’s demise and his name to her benefit her financially as a business opportunity. In the process, she’s publicly shamed him and tarnished his name. And to add to that, she’s added her own daughter to the game that she’s playing as well. It’s not his suicide that she’s hated for, but her actions thereafter. In fact, his suicide made her more loved up until the truth came out. The public was rooting for her as a widow. The public wanted her to succeed in the aftermath of her husband’s death.

Ted Hughes never had this in common with Holker. He never did such a thing with neither Sylvia nor Assia. He didn’t need to. He already had enough success in his career. I can confidently say that we should never romanticize his love story with neither one of the 2 tormented women. These weren’t love stories for the books. They weren’t extraordinary. They were filled with turmoil, disparate, anguish, and sadness. Nevertheless, Ted Hughes wasn’t to blame for their deaths. He wasn’t responsible for Sylvia and Assia depressions. Unlike Holker, he’d shown remorse for the ways he treated both women until the end of his life. He felt tormented, to the point that he practically erased any traces of Assia from his life.

But I guess it also has to do with the drastic difference in how we view men and women in widowhood. Men and women experience widowhood in different ways. There are emotional differences, financial differences, and social differences.

Emotional differences 

• Men – Men may experience more negative emotions, such as depression and loneliness. They may also feel more disrupted by the loss of marital health benefits. 
• Women – Women may face more challenges with somatic symptoms, such as restless sleep. They may also be better equipped to cope with the loss because they often have other close confidents in addition to their spouse.

Financial differences

• Women – Women may experience a greater and longer lasting deterioration of their financial situations than widowers. This may be because men typically have a higher income and larger retirement savings. 
• Men – Men may experience greater disruption from the loss of marital health benefits

Social differences

• Women – Women are more likely to move on than widowers in the years immediately following the death of their partner. They may also experience more emotional support from their social networks. 
• Men – Men may find domestic tasks more daunting and therefore depressing. They may also experience a decrease in assistance to children

Ted Hughes wasn’t the root cause for the deaths of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill. He was the final straw. This is something that’s very important to remember when we think of him and try to villainize him. The one innocent person in the entire love triangle was Shura. I’d like to end this blog entry with a quote by the poet, ‘Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.’ That’s how all of us should strive to live our lives…