Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love

by Yehuda Koren, Eilat Negev

Overview

The failure of the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has always been considered from one of two conflicting viewpoints: hers or his. Missing for more than four decades has been a third perspective on the events that brought their marriage to its ill-fated end, the story of another -- the other -- woman: Hughes' mistress Assia Wevill. Like Plath before her, Assia shared her life with Hughes for seven years, until she took her own life and that of their daughter at the age of forty-two, in a manner that nearly replicated Plath's suicide six years earlier. Drawing on previously unavailable documents and private papers, including Assia's diaries and her intimate correspondence with Hughes, this book shows the vital influence Assia exerted on the poet and his work, and the uneasy life they shared under the long shadow of Plath. A Lover of Unreason is the first-ever full-length biography of Assia Wevill. It casts a keen light, and explores the emergence of a singular twentieth-century woman. Three-times divorcé career woman, mistress, and single mother, Assia Wevill openly defied the conventions of a censorious pre-feminist Britain and mesmerized men and women alike with her quick-mind and exotic beauty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786721054
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	01/29/2008
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yehuda Koren, a freelance journalist for the British, Israeli, and German press, and Eilat Negev, the senior literary correspondent for Yedioth Achronoth, previously co-authored In Our Hearts We Were Giants. Yehuda Koren, a freelance journalist for the British, Israeli, and German press, and Eilat Negev, the senior literary correspondent for Yedioth Achronoth, previously co-authored In Our Hearts We Were Giants.

Editorial Reviews

Assia Wevill, known as the woman who took Ted Hughes from Sylvia Plath, not only lived in Plath’s apartment after her suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning but killed herself and her four-year-old daughter in the same manner, six years later. This biography recounts a nomadic childhood spent in Berlin, Pisa, and Tel Aviv; an equally peripatetic adulthood in England, Burma, and Canada (amid three marriages and divorces); and a successful career as an advertising copywriter and translator of Hebrew poetry. Hughes comes off as both brutal (in his perpetual ambivalence about setting up house with Wevill) and beleaguered (in dealing with the histrionics of a woman whose beauty had accustomed her to special treatment). The authors write with nimble, novelistic pacing, though their research yields some details that perpetuate the sense of tawdriness they intended to dispel: “The love nest she shared with Ted was sometimes a 1950 white Ford van that one of Ted’s friends loaned him.

The New Yorker

The "other woman" in the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes divorce receives long-delayed consideration in this assiduously researched, compulsively readable biography, where the authors draw on newly revealed primary sources. The life of thrice-married Assia Wevill (1927-1969) makes a fascinating story even before her six-year affair with Hughes and the birth of his (unacknowledged) daughter, Shura. Born in Berlin of a Russian Jewish father and a German Lutheran mother, raised in Tel Aviv, married to a British soldier in order to gain a British passport, Assia was, as the authors demonstrate, a smoldering femme fatale, albeit highly intelligent, witty and talented. While Koren and Negev (In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe) don't whitewash Assia's volatile, self-absorbed personality or her serial adulteries, they do contradict the widespread impression that Assia was the initial seducer of Hughes. This will be an important book for Hughes scholars, primarily for the authors' exclusive 1996 interview with the poet, in which he identified the poems he wrote alluding to Assia after her death, which he felt no critic had ever interpreted correctly. Newly revealed letters and interviews reinforce previous accounts of Hughes's sexual attraction and the dedicated philandering that drove two women to suicide. Photos. (Jan. 23) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This important biography is the first on Assia Wevill (1927–69), one of the ill-fated loves of British poet laureate Ted Hughes (poet Sylvia Plath, his first wife, was the other). Assia's life combined trauma and tragedy with few triumphs. Although well educated and multilingual, she endured poor schooling, neurotic parents, Nazi persecution, and three failed marriages. And she was never able to develop her own writing, always feeling overshadowed by Plath. One doubts, however, that Koren and Negev (coauthors, In Our Hearts We Were Giants) are trying to elicit sympathy, for they embellish each mood swing, each flash of anger, each selfish impulse. In fact, Plath and Wevill are both described on occasion as knife-wielding females whose uncontrollable emotions presumably led to their suicides (years apart but eerily similar). Much of this material came from previously unpublished letters and Wevill's diaries, but there are few excerpts from her own writing. Even the detailed index omits a listing (the authors claim only two of her poems survive). This biography thus leaves few scraps for academic patrons to glean; public library patrons, however, may find it lurid reading.
—Nedra Crowe Evers Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

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