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Ebook431 pages7 hours
A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill
By Yehuda Koren
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
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About this ebook
Assia was my true wife, and the best friend I ever had', wrote Ted Hughes, after his lover surrendered her life and that of their young daughter in 1969, six years after Sylvia Plath had suffered a similiar fate. Diva, she-devil, enchantress, muse, Lillith, Jezebel - Assia inspired many epithets during her life. The tragic story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has always been related from one of two points of view: hers or his. Missing for over four decades had been a third: that of Hughes's mistress. This first biography of Assia Wevill views afresh the Plath-Hughes relationship and at the same time, recounts the journey that shaped her life. Wevill's is a complex story, formed as it is by the pull of often contrary forces.
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Reviews for A Lover of Unreason
Rating: 4.666666666666667 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
9 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For those unfamiliar with the chronology, Sylvia Plath, the poet, married Ted Hughes, the poet, in 1956, year 1 for convenient counting here. In year 7, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. However, it was in Year 6, that the very attractive Ted Hughes sought out the fabulously captivating Assia Wevill. Their affair lasted until Year 13, or 1969, when she committed suicide, taking their presumed child with her.This book is a detailed biography of Assia, collected from many sources and conversations with people who knew her. Little is said of Sylvia, but a portrait of Ted does emerge in his relationship toward Assia. In his public life, 15 years later in 1984. he would go on to become the honored Poet Laureate of England. But in his private life, he emerges from these pages as a womanizing cad who was cruel and heartless toward Assia during her increasing emotional turmoil toward the end. I could not continue past page 193, when the story of her torment simply became too painful for me to continue reading.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5With the lurid subtitle 'Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's rival and Ted Hughes' doomed love', you might find yourself wanting to give this biography a wide berth. After all, how much do we really need to know about the private lives of public figures? Nevertheless, there are few details of the relationship between Plath and Hughes that have not been dissected in numberless books and articles. What I think this book seeks to do is to provide a counter-balance to the popular view of Assia Wevill as a home-wrecker, whose suicide (so eerily similar to Plath's) represented a lapse of taste. It is easy to be horrified that Assia chose to end not only her own life, but also that of her young daughter by Hughes. However, as a single mother, and in the light of Hughes' apparent disinterest in his illegitimate child, it is possible to understand how Assia couldn't bear to leave behind her daughter for the fates to deal with.Assia Wevill nee Gutmann seems to have understood herself very well: 'I was endowed with too many minor qualities, but with neither the will or the huge intelligence to bring them a life of their own'. A highly intelligent woman, she nevertheless seems to have envied Plath's talent and always felt the ghost of Plath around her, though she refused to take any blame for her suicide.Astonishingly beautiful, Assia was a rootless person. Her father was a Russian Jew, her mother German Lutheran. The family left Germany due to the growing Nazi threat and settled in Tel Aviv, but Assia never felt at home there, and once she'd left - aged 19 - she never returned. She married three times. As Fay Weldon, a friend and colleague of Assia's, points out, 'In those pre-feminist days, women saw their lives in terms of being loved or not loved by a man'. Although her relationship with Hughes hobbled on after Plath's suicide, it was a troubled relationship. Plath's ghost was never far away, and Hughes' parents disliked her.The Assia who emerges from this biography is a vulnerable woman with the potential to achieve so much more than she actually did. Fans of Hughes might not relish the authors' view of him as faithless and predatory, and this is not by any means a great book, but it does at least go some way to balancing the scales. Plath and Hughes must have been difficult people to have a relationship with. Assia was complicated and self-absorbed, and never quite found her niche in life. In many ways she was perhaps too much like Plath for the relationship with Hughes to have worked out. I think it is only right, given the eternal muck-raking that has gone on into the lives of two exceptionally talented people, that Assia's voice, too, is finally heard.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very readable biography of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes' lover. Her life was interesting, if tragic- and it adds another facet to the Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent, intriguing, heart rending biography of a woman who could have been the heroine of an opera.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Assia Wevill is the dark lady of the Plath/Hughes agon. As Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev put it in "Lover of Unreason" (Carroll & Graf, 268 pages, $27.95), "Assia was reduced to the role of a she-devil and an enchantress, the woman alleged to have severed the union of twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated couple."When Sylvia Plath and Assia first met, they liked each other. Assia, a part-Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, bore, in Plath's words, her "passport on her face." She had lived the suffering that Sylvia had imagined in poems like "Daddy." Plath was happy that Assia and her husband David, a fine poet, would occupy the flat she and Ted were relinquishing to pursue their passion for poetry and for each other in the Devon countryside.Then the Wevills were invited to Devon, and the world went terribly wrong. Later Ted Hughes would accuse Assia of being the "dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia." Several biographers say Assia boasted to friends she was putting on her war paint to seduce Ted Hughes. She was on her third marriage and had a reputation as a femme fatale.But what exactly happened in Devon is hard to say. Even Olwyn Hughes, a staunch defender of her brother, could tell Anne Stevenson (commissioned by the Hughes Estate to write "Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath" [1989]), no more than what Assia told Olywn: There had been a "sexual current" between Assia and Ted that enraged Sylvia. In "Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath" (1991), Paul Alexander reports: "Strong-will and determined, Assia — apparently — made the first move with Ted." Diane Middlebrook in "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath — A Marriage" (2003) follows a similar line, suggesting Assia had Ted "under a spell."And yet Elaine Feinstein's "Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet" (2001) presents evidence that confirms the story in "Lover of Unreason": Ted Hughes was "a sexual stalker by nature" and no longer enraptured with Sylvia, who had become a housewife and mother — a "hag," as he called her in one of their arguments after the Wevill visit to Devon. According to Ms. Feinstein, Hughes eventually tired of Assia too because, in the words of William Congreve's "Way of the World," she had begun to "dwindle into a wife."Whatever the alluring Assia did or did not do during that fateful rendezvous in Devon, she became the vessel of Ted Hughes's desire to shuck off his domestic duties and seek some haven where he could recapture his poetic spirit. Assia did not make it easy for Hughes, since she still cared a great deal for David Wevill and continued to live with him off and on. Meanwhile, Hughes attempted to square himself with his disapproving parents and settle on some kind of domestic routine with the two young children Plath had been careful not to gas when she took her life on February 11, 1963.But if Assia was slow to forsake David — as David has made clear to several biographers — she could not have been simply the she-devil enchantress of legend. Perhaps the most telling part of "Lover of Unreason" concerns Hughes's search for a home that he and Assia could share. A man who had never previously had trouble making up his mind about where to live, Hughes repeatedly found fault with the houses he and Assia inspected. Indeed, he led her on, for during this house-hunting period he had several other women on the side — it was Hughes's practice to create the conditions that provoked women to leave him.No biographer would be willing to state that Ted Hughes was a very bad man, for to do so is to invite the biography to be read as an indictment. Ms. Feinstein feels the need to mitigate Hughes's appalling behavior — destroying some of Plath's work, essentially erasing the record of Assia's important role in his life, and in so many ways attempting to control the telling not only of his biography but those of Plath and Wevill. To Ms. Feinstein, Hughes had a "granite endurance" to go on writing after so many tragedies. Of his cover-ups, she suggests he took the "harsh road of a survivor." Yehuda Kore and Eilat Negev are careful not to condemn him, but they eschew such rationalizations.The worst of it is that on March 23, 1969, Assia Wevill took not only her life but also that of her 4-year-old daughter by Hughes. As her biographers show, such acts are not uncommon among single mothers in their 40s who are so disturbed at the horrible nature of the world that they cannot imagine a better one for their offspring. Except for a few periods and poems of self-blame, Hughes never could confront his culpable role in the lives of Plath and Wevill; instead, he issued his apologia in the form of a poetry collection, "Birthday Letters" (1998). So it is fortunate indeed to have "Lover of Unreason," an impressively researched and well-told biography that will occasion, I believe, yet another rewriting of the Plath/ Hughes agon.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I find A lover of unreason: The life and tragic death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes' doomed love completely irresistible and very well researched and written. Those of us lucky enough to be at the Plath Symposium in 2002 at Indiana were teased with some of the information presented in the biography. Shock and awe spread throughout the auditorium when Koren and Negev spoke about the Plath/Hughes trip to Ireland, the deception, and the Hughes/Wevill trip to Spain. That was barely the tip of the iceberg in this very complicated situation.The success of A Lover of Unreason in my opinion comes from presenting a very full and human picture of Assia; a woman who has been alternately ignored and raked over coals and not given sufficient attention. Here is a woman who was far, far from perfect and revered only for her uncommon and undeniable beauty, presented in a way that reminded me much of how Plath was presented in Bitter Fame. I was not expecting a book of idolatry, but I also was not expecting to find that Wevill did have some redeemable qualities. This is truly an enlightening read and brings an important piece of the Plath/Hughes puzzle closer to completion.Assia's journals, according to the text, are in private hands. They shed some very crucial information into not just her own mind and life, but also into Plath's and Hughes?. I would not mind being introduced to those private hands! I wonder if there are any plans to publish them or to deposit them with an archive?