Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet - Elaine Feinstein

Published in 2001, this was the first full-length biography of the enigmatic Hughes. As such, it laid out the groundplan which others have since followed. A fair bit of detail about the childhood years, a long account of the six-year marriage to Sylvia Plath, and a brisk canter through the remaining thirty-five years.


Feinstein is herself a poet, thus her insights into Ted's work are particularly valuable. She was a friend of Ted and fellow client of his sister/agent Olwyn. As such, she provides a welcome counterbalance to many of the more militant accounts from the pro-Plath camp. Whilst she does rather gallop through the second half of Hughes's career, she nevertheless takes due time to consider and evaluate the stream of work he maintained. She even delves into areas that few others mention - his prose work, for example, notably the vast Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. She is frank in her depiction of the always controversial Olwyn and generous in her account of Carol, Ted's second wife. Ted's death, which was fresh in her mind when she wrote the book, is profoundly moving.


The only area in which I take exception is a series of broad and unsupported generalisations which for reasons unknown Feinstein makes about Northern men and their attitude to women. It is an area in which I may be better qualified, being myself a Northern man, a generation younger than Hughes, admittedly, but from the next valley along with most of my ancestry from the same valley as him. I even share his South Yorkshire connections. And I can assure Feinstein that, in my experience, she could not be more wrong in her assumptions about the term 'mother' when used as a synonym for 'wife'.


With that proviso, which is of course always open to argument, there can be no better place to start delving into the life of England's greatest poet of the late Twentieth Century.

Ted Hughes: An Unauthorised Life - Jonathan Bate

When Bate's book came out at the end of 2015 I thought, here it is at last - a comprehensive, authoritative, objective analysis of Hughes's life and work.  I thought it was an odds-on favourite for the big literary prizes.  It didn't go on to win.  I now know why.

Bate brings very little that's new to the table.  This is understandable, given that Hughes lived all his professional life in the media glare, his grim personal life far outweighing his literary output, save where, at the beginning and end of his career, the two were the same.

Bate began the work as an authorised life, with the full support of the notoriously controlling Hughes Estate. He fell from favour when he started throwing in more extra-marital lovers.  He comes across as somewhat petulant, therefore, when discussing the two women who, until just after the book came out, controlled the Estate.  Hughes's sister Olwyn, who died earlier this year, is treated harshly.  Bate is by no means the first writer on Hughes or Plath to do so, but Olwyn was sister and agent and even publisher (through the Rainbow Press) and was thus the last surviving participant in the process.  Bate makes one very unsavoury inference which, without the proof that can never be produced, is unpardonable.  Hughes's second wife Carol is understandably offended by those who dwell on the scurrilous side of the great man's activities and she is not a poet,  Bate's solution is to ignore her more or less entirely.  His assessment of her character boils down to young, uneducated, irrelevant - yet she was Hughes's wife for the thick end of thirty years.  She ran his home and raised his children.  She should be treated better than this by any objective biographer.

Considering the poetry Bate is naturally on confident ground - he is, after all, Professor of English Literature at Oxford.  I didn't see that many original insights, though.  Hughes might have been inspired by Wordsworth and Yeats but he ploughed his own poetic furrow and I felt that Bate rather overplayed the parallels.  On Robert Graves and The White Goddess, which Hughes later took forward in his own Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Bate really came into his own, treating the now old-fashioned and eccentric theory with fairness and thoroughness because however off-beam it might seem to us, this was a concept deeply held.

I was irked and frustrated that there is no discussion of the early plays for radio, which after all paid the bills during the period most people are interested in - the Plath years.  It doesn't bother me so much but anyone who wants to know more about Hughes's writing for children (other than The Iron Man) will be equally frustrated.

Is The Unauthorised Life worth reading?  Yes - absolutely.  Is it definitive or even a significant advance towards a definitive understand of Hughes's life or work?  Not, not at all.

The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath - Ronald Hayman

It's an odd book, first published in 1991 when Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn were both still alive, still exercising their notorious stranglehold over the Plath estate, and revised in 2003, after Hughes had died and more material had become available.  Revised, but not rewritten - you sense, as you read, that some of the old material still pokes through where the new is available and indeed given.

Hayman tries to be even handed; he shows that Plath was demanding and ultimately deranged, but she is nevertheless his subject and protagonist, and Ted Hughes is always referred to by both names and thereby distanced.  There are some very good parts.  I personally enjoyed Hayman's critique of the sole radio play, Three Women.  I felt less confident with his reading of some of the later, indeed last poems.

The style is simple and direct, even in extrapolating the unfathomable (Plath's most elusive poems and her roiling psyche), and wisely doesn't do what Middlebrook too often does in her study of the marriage (see below) - he doesn't try to show off his own literary talents.

The Death and Life is therefore a slightly odd construct but it's a good book and essential reading for Plath enthusiasts.

Her Husband - Hughes and Plath: A Marriage - Diane Middlebrook

The title is well-chosen.  Middlebrook, an eminent US scholar and poet who sadly died in 2007, just three years after this major work was published, focuses on the marriage itself and the art that resulted for both protagonists.  Of course an account of their very different childhoods is essential context, but Middlebrook keeps it short and to the point.  What matters for her, and for us, is their coming together and their creative partnership.  Likewise, Plath's end has to be there - it changed everything and will always colour our perceptions of surely the most accomplished poetic couple.  Middlebrook does this very well and very fairly.  Plath killed herself because she was ill.  She had always had mental problems and had been hospitalised after a suicide attempt as a teenager.  Hughes's humiliating affair with Assia Wevill can't have helped but it certainly wasn't the trigger.

The first two-thirds of the book are exemplary.  Of course as an American, a woman, a scholar and a poet, Middlebrook feels more attuned to Plath and her work.  I am a man, an academic, and an English northerner born in same Pennine post-industrial wasteland as Hughes, so naturally my affinity is with him.  For me, the final third of Her Husband falters slightly, though I do not know what Middlebrook could have done to improve the situation.  Hughes and Plath were still married when she died.  Her estate automatically came to him.  He oversaw its publication but - some would say infamously - removed unfortunate references to himself and others.  Without him The Bell Jar would not have become a core feminist text, Ariel would not have cemented Sylvia's reputation whilst the memory of her was still fresh, and the Journals would likely not have surfaced until after his own death in 1998.  Because he edited them, there are other versions out there and a thriving trade has emerged in Plath's literary afterlife.  Middlebrook treats Hughes's work as editor with an open mind; the problem is that she feels obliged to also consider his personal work, which does not appeal to her so much. This in turn leads to rounding-off his biography and his reprehensible behaviour to other women in his life.  To my mind she would have been better sticking to her thesis - the marriage of minds and talents with a survey of Plath's legacy as managed and manipulated by 'her husband' as an afterpiece.

It is, nonetheless, the best Hughes/Plath study I have read.