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.

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.