Writers in Love: A Portrait of the Marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

December 6, 2025

“To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’s unfaithfulness,” writes Janet Malcolm in Silent Woman, her 1994 biography of Sylvia Plath. “She will never reach the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked back upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness. Ted Hughes has reached this age… but he has been cheated of the peace that age brings by the posthumous fame of Plath and by the public’s fascination with the story of her life.” The relationship (and eventual downfall) between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was fast-paced and highly publicized, and has also been referred to as “The most notorious, politicized, and doomed literary couple in history.” 

Sylvia Plath’s family life and transformation from youth into adulthood are reflected (though not exactly) through The Bell Jar, with the character of Esther Greenwood taking the place of Plath. Mrs. Greenwood is a “merciless portrait” of Aurelia, Plath’s mother; Mrs. Greenwood, as stated by Nan Robertson in a 1979 New York Times article, “emerges as an unfeeling, uncaring soul who rarely visits her daughter, Esther, in the mental institution where she has been committed.” In reality, Aurelia Plath was a hardworking single mother, with Sylvia’s father Otto dying of a diabetes-related illness when Sylvia was around eight years old. In a 1975 New York Times article, Maureen Howard describes Aurelia’s situation, saying:

Constantly faced with financial crises after [Otto’s] death, suffering from overwork and ulcers, [Aurelia] managed, with the help of her parents, to teach full-time at Boston University and make a sensible move to Wellesley, where her two precocious children might take advantage of the fine school system. Life in the modest household was enlightened. She was courageous, uncomplaining, magnificent--and her daughter knew it, unmistakably.

From the young age of eight, Sylvia Plath began writing poetry and submitting her work to contests, seemingly spurred on by “a ‘pathological obsession with achievement” coupled with the looming sacrifices of her mother. In Plath’s works, Otto is frequently personified through bees, and seen in a derogatory yet obsessive light. In her October 1962 poem “Daddy”, the speaker struggles between seeing her father in an esteemed, memorialized light but also as a sinful and oppressive authority figure. His memory haunts her in both ways, Plath writes: “Bit my pretty red heart in two. / I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do.” Autobiographically, these ages align with Plath’s own life. She was eight years old when he died in early November of 1940. In Mad Girl’s Love Song, his 2013 biography of Plath, Andrew Wilson asserts that her mention of being ten when her father was buried instead refers to a situation that occurred when she was ten years old and tried to cut her own throat as a reaction to grief brought on by father’s death. All other sources, however, date her first suicide attempt as August 24, 1953, aged exactly twenty years old. In a paper focused on Plath’s earliest suicide attempt, Peter K. Steinberg writes, “Her disappearance sparked a major local and regional search. At first Plath was a missing person, but within a day it was discovered that her sleeping pills were gone. As a result, the police concluded Plath attempted suicide and updated the public via news sources.” She was found two days later, after a highly publicized search, “semi-conscious but apparently uninjured under the porch of her home” after taking “48 sleeping tablets”. In The Bell Jar, Esther attempts to take her own life in the exact same way—she steals a bottle of sleeping pills from her mother’s room and hides in the cellar, where she “unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.” According to Steinberg, 311 news articles were published regarding her disappearance.

Two years older than Plath, Theodore Hughes was Cambridge-educated, and worked odd jobs at zoos and public gardens to support his writing career. Before college, he served in the Royal Air Force as a ground wireless mechanic. Elaine Feinstein, one of only a few Hughes biographers, writes in an op-ed for The Guardian, “He had dominated English poetry for decades, since he was a Yorkshire teenager obsessed by hunting and fishing for pike. He was Wordsworth soaked in blood and cruelty, bleak and euphoric.” In her biography, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, Feinstein writes that Hughes came from a middle class family, and his Yorkshire accent “would have been used to place him instantly” in the “class divisions that permeated the university.” At school, he avidly published his work in student literary magazines, founding the St. Botolph’s Review literary magazine with a handful of friends from college, its inaugural party being where he would later meet Plath. 

Of Hughes’ childhood and life at college, however, not much is known. His estate, managed by his widow Carol Orchard, has guarded the usage of a majority of his manuscripts and drafts, as well as journal entries and daily notes, for biographical use. Professor Jonathan Bate writes in an op-ed for The Guardian that upon meeting with the publisher of his prospective Hughes biography, “we kept the form of words that the book was not to be called a biography and that the estate was providing ‘full co-operation’ rather than ‘authorisation’.” Over a span of four years, Bate concocted hundreds of pages of text. In his op-ed, he continues “I was on the brink of sending them about half the typescript in draft form when they received a letter saying that the estate of Ted Hughes was withdrawing its co-operation from my book. No reason was given.” While Bate used paraphrasing and literature criticism laws in order to publish his biography of Hughes in 2015, which he titled Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life. In response, the Hughes estate requested via press release that Orchard receives an apology from Bate, citing that his book contains multiple errors. Most of Hughes’ early life story has been hidden behind copyright law and locked away in forgotten archives, although he remains a very well-known poet. 

Today, Sylvia Plath’s life seems to be marked by one point—the ending of it. On February 11, 1963, Plath was found, already dead of asphyxiation, her lifeless head lodged deep inside her gas oven. Towels were stuffed under the door, which was also sealed with layers of tape, to trap the toxic gasses from harming her two children, who lay asleep in the next room over. She was only thirty years old. “When a female author dies by suicide, it defines her,” culture writer Lillian Crawford wrote in a 2021 BBC article. Additionally, her suicide “brought her instant fame in England, where she made occasional appearances on the BBC and was beginning to be known through her publications,” wrote Francis McCullough in her foreword to Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar. McCullough, who edited various journals of Plath’s for publication, adds, “But she was still not well known here in her native land.” 

In 1956, after graduating from Smith College, Plath won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge. The week before she met her future husband, Plath wrote in her personal journal, “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” Plath and Hughes first met at a release party for St. Botolph’s Review that featured a handful of Hughes’ own poems. At this point, Hughes was already a well-known poet, while Plath, who had been published quite often in smaller literary magazines, was still quite obscure in the literary world. Plath, who had memorized a portion of one of his poems that was to be published in St. Botolph’s, introduced herself, and minutes later, kissed him, “bit[ing] him long and hard on the cheek.”

After the primary meeting, the pair “saw a great deal of each other,” said Plath in a 1961 BBC interview. “Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later…We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we were both writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.” 

Together, they formed a unique coworking relationship, consisting not of editing each other’s works, but instead of what they referred to as the ‘call and response method.’ The pair would work side by side, writing individual poems in response to each other. In the final lines of “Love Is A Parallax”, an unpublished work from her college years, Plath writes, “...yet love / knows not of death nor calculus above / the simple sum of heart plus heart.” Within a four-month period in 1956, Plath and Hughes met, fell in love, and were married in June. In “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress”, Hughes recounts the normalcy of the weekday of their wedding ceremony. For Hughes, this was a time when all was well, saying, “Before anything had smudged anything / You stood at the altar”. He writes that he was a “Frog-Prince” in relation to Plath’s ethereal beauty, wearing the titular pink knitted dress and pink ribbon in her hair in lieu of wearing a classical white dress. In this piece, he speaks of her with love and true admiration. The final line, “Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me”, impresses that their marriage was a gamble, even from the very beginning. Hughes later wrote a letter to Plath biographer Anne Stevenson referencing this poem, which she included in her book Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. To Hughes, this poem represents “a simple wish to recapture for myself, if I can, the privacy of my own conclusions about Sylvia, and to remove the contaminations of everyone else’s.” In this, Hughes attempts to display a day of mutual beauty and celebration for the pair, herding her image away from “her watchtowered searchlit future”.

In Diane Middlebrook’s essay “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Call and Response”, she offers, “Working side by side, they developed a dynamic of mutual influence that produced the poems we read today.” When comparing Plath’s poem “Pursuit” to Hughes’ “The Jaguar”. Plath’s poem begins, “There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him;”. This poem was written in 1956, presumably in the months after meeting and becoming well-acquainted with Hughes. In Hughes’ draft of “The Jaguar”, he writes of a child who runs past every animal in the zoo, heading straight for the jaguar: “But who runs like the rest past / these arrives / At a cage where the crowd stands, / stares, mesmerized”. Hughes and Plath’s marriage of mutually productive collaboration continued through the birth of their first child.

A well-noted (but later occuring) example of the couples’ collaborative work is Plath’s October 1962 “Lady Lazarus” with Hughes’ “Red”. In his book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Plath’s editor and companion A. Alvarez recollects her showing him “Lady Lazarus” for the first time, noting, “she read me what she called ‘some light verse.’” In this poem, a bitter and tortured narrator has attempted to take her own life “every ten” years. Believing that these attempts make her feel “real” and charged, the narrator feels that she has risen “out of the ash” like a mythological phoenix reborn from flame, and ready to take revenge. Like the narrator of “Lady Lazarus”, Alvarez notes that  “She seems to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome.” For Plath, whom he calls “…a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband…”, Alvarez believes that Plath’s own suicide was accidental: “Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death, an attempt ‘to seize upon the midnight with no pain’; it was something to be felt in the nerve ends and fought against, and initiation right qualifying her for a life of her own.” “Lady Lazarus” was written over a week in late October, a mere four months before she took her own life. In response, Hughes wrote “Red”, although it was not published until 1998 when he released Birthday Letters, this poem taking up the final pages. The piece opens, “Red was your colour. / If not red, then white. But red / Was what was you wrapped around you.” Employing his beloved color symbolism, red acts as an inner sense of passion coupled with a grim undertone of its implied reference to blood, while white represents functionality or even pureness—an operative wife versus the mental illness that continuously pulls her down. He continues applying these comparisons, writing that “Our room was red. A judgement chamber” and “You revelled in red. / I felt it raw…/ I could touch / the open vein in it, the crusted gleam”. In these lines, Hughes shows that Plath’s descent into delusion also impacted his life: her illness seeped into the walls of their bedroom, meaning that the feelings continued even when the pair were alone with each other. His word choice of ‘revelled’ reveals that there may even be a sense of manic excitement on her part culminating with her mental downfall. Finally, Hughes writes, “Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness”, showing that her writings offered her a safe space away from her neurosis. The piece ends, “In the pit of red / You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness. / But the jewel you lost was blue.” The final poem of the anthology and his final word on his wife shows that Plath should be remembered not through her infamous demise or violent, blood-red, poetry, but instead as the woman that he loved.

In an April 1956 letter written by Sylvia to Aurelia, the former notes that “Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine: they are strong and full and rich… they are working, sweating, heaving poems born out of the way words should be said…” In an October 1956 letter from Plath to Hughes, she writes:

Teddy Teddy Teddy: I have the feeling that if only I see you, just curl up warmly with you, all this tension, the gorging of fury which I eat again and again until it crams my throat, all this will flow gently away and there will be peace peace peace.

She signs off the typewritten letter with a handwritten note—“I love you to hell and back and to every last cell of my being and thought - love to my darling lovely ponky own ted - yours, sylvia”. With such touching lines of love and true devotion, it is hard to conceive the future that would soon come to consume them.

Plath’s 1956 poems “Faun” and “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” help to capture her loneliness during this otherwise joyous moment in her life. “Faun” seems to show Plath’s own efforts to fight for Hughes’ attention amidst other women: “Haunched like a faun, he hooked / From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost / Until all owls in the twigged forest / Flapped black to look and brood / On the call this man made.” In this piece, Hughes is the faun, with the eyes of all animals in the forest focused on him, longingly. Meanwhile, Plath is isolated and does not even feel like an object of his desire. In “Soliloquy of the Solipsist”, the speaker comes to terms with her internal loneliness, even though her life as a poet offers her entrance into worlds beyond her grandest dreams. Still, the speaker’s seclusion grounds her, saying, “All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, / From me.” Even though the poem is presented as a soliloquy, the speaker still seems to be begging for attention and recognition.

Middlebrook asserts that Plath’s sudden pregnancy and birth of Frieda led to a strengthening in the pair’s marriage, noting of the poems written during this period, “it is impossible to know how many of the call-and-response transactions among these poems were intentional.” Newly tinged by the enrichments of motherhood, Sylvia Plath wrote “Stillborn” in July 1960, around three months after giving birth. In this satirical piece, Plath compares a forgotten or unfinished poem to the grimy body of a stillborn baby: “These poems do not live : it’s a sad diagnosis / … / It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.” In the months after giving birth, it is notable that Plath is still concerned with infertility, even managing to sneak the concept of barrenness into her poems by way of metaphor. Two years prior, around June 1958, Plath’s poem “Moonrise” shows her internal fear of infertility, the poem begins: “Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves. / I’ll go out and sit in white like they do,”, while the final lines are “The berries purple / And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet.”, showing a hint of internal hope that she may actually become pregnant, contradicting the harsh and graphic tone given by the personification of berries as the blood of a fetus. 

Eventually, in February 1961, Plath suffered from a miscarriage at some point between the birth of Frieda in April 1960 and Nicholas in January 1962. According to Heather Clark’s dense 2020 biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, “Sylvia miscarried on February 6. “I lost the little baby this morning & feel really terrible about it,” she wrote to her mother. She estimated that she had been four months along.” Clark continues, detailing the moment that Plath found “evidence of an affair” and went into what Hughes later described as a “rage” with a “demonic side, destructive, like ‘black electricity.’” In The Savage God, Alvarez writes, “Her poetry acted as a strange, powerful lens through which her ordinary life was filtered and refigured with extraordinary intensity.” In dealing with the despair brought on by her miscarriage, Plath produced a handful of poems. Dated February 19th, 1961, “Morning Song” deals with a new mother and the shock that falls over her in accepting the arrival of her baby, saying, “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” The speaker feels an absence of maternal love, that the relationship between her and her new baby is more of a forced yet alienated attachment. Written two days later, “Barren Woman” is short, only consisting of two stanzas. The speaker refers to herself as “Empty, I echo to the least footfall / Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.” In comparison to everyone else present in the city square, the speaker sees herself as an empty museum, free of any decoration or statues, which seems to represent children. Without statues to adorn her museum, she feels purposeless amongst the others. The moon, which represents the menstrual cycle in many of Plath’s works, is also personified in this poem: “The moon lays a hand on my forehead, / Blank-faced and mum as a nurse” The moon, rather than showing love and/or care for the speaker while in their sorry state, treats her with indifference and detachment, as a nurse in a ward. 

In 2017, fourteen letters from Plath to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher (who was the model for Dr. Nolan in The Bell Jar) were unearthed and put up for auction (these works were previously unheard of). One of these letters, dated September 22, 1962, Plath wrote “Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage.” 

The summer after her miscarriage, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented out their flat to fellow writer Assia Wevill and her husband David so that Hughes and Plath could move to Devon, England. After Hughes met Assia for the first time, he wrote “Dreamers” (which was later published in Birthday Letters, and is sandwiched between loving odes to Plath): 

We didn’t find her – she found us.

She sniffed us out. The Fate she carried

Sniffed us out / And assembled us, inert ingredients

…

I refused to interpret. I saw

The dreamer in her

Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

That moment the dreamer in me

Fell in love with her, and I knew it.

Wevill and Hughes continued to meet, both partners were married, but neither seemed to care.

Soon after her miscarriage, Sylvia Plath became pregnant again, and Nicholas was born in mid-January of 1962. After the birth of Nicholas, Alvarez writes, Sylvia “seemed to be functioning as efficiently as ever. Yet when I saw Ted sometime later in London, he was tense and preoccupied. Driving on her own, Sylvia had some kind of accident; apparently she had blacked out and run off the road onto an old airfield… His dark presence, as he spoke, darkened an even deeper shade of gloom.” That June, Plath was involved in a solo car accident when she drove her car near a river, which she later classified as a suicide attempt.  “I remember one prominent feminist critic who aspired to be her biographer saying, about Plath’s difficult last year of marriage: ‘I don’t get it—why didn’t she just walk out?’”, McCullough writes in her The Bell Jar introduction, “as though that would be an obvious option for a young American woman stranded in the British countryside with two small children and no funds in the very early sixties.” 

In September of 1962, on the fourth day of Plath and Hughes vacationing together in Ireland, “Hughes disappeared to London to meet Wevill, with whom he embarked on a 10 day trip through Spain, the same place where Plath and Hughes had honeymooned.” Plath, abandoned, had already come to terms in July that he was involved with another woman, so this additional evidence solidified her internal questioning. Plath wrote a handful of poems during this period in which his infidelity was finally revealed—“The Other” and “Words heard, by accident, over the phone” being the two standout pieces. “The Other” begins, “You come in late, wiping your lips. / What did I leave untouched on the doorstep —”. Evidently, Plath has become aware of his affair, writing “Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream. / Cold glass, how you insert yourself”. With these two sets of lines, Plath’s suspiciousness supersedes the jealousy that her husband is giving others attention, while the speaker remains alone. Meanwhile,  “Words heard, by accident, over the phone” portrays a sense of dread as it falls over and consumes the speaker: “But the spawn percolate in my heart. They are fertile.” While the speaker, aware that they should not be listening, feels drawn to continue. However, what they hear is assumably depreciating. If autobiographical, this piece could be perceived as Plath hearing Wevill and Hughes on the phone, but the actualities and background of the piece have never been confirmed.

When Hughes arrived back home, and “refused to end his affair with Wevill”, Plath kicked him out of the house, therefore beginning the process of separation, which will forever remain suspended and unfinished, as the pair was still legally married when Plath killed herself that upcoming February. According to the Daily Mail, “Plath was still breastfeeding Nicholas when she discovered the affair and ordered Ted out of the house. He fled happily enough - the following day he was knocking on Wevill's door carrying four bottles of Champagne.”

During this time, in mid October, Plath wrote her poem, “Daddy”, wherein she writes “And I said I do, I do. / So daddy, I’m finally through.” Her repetition of ‘I do’ represents the marriage between herself and Hughes, showing that the man that she married is eerily similar to the man she wants to free herself from, her father. In “A Picture of Otto”, featured in Hughes’ Birthday Letters, he describes himself entering the underworld and meeting Otto, Plath’s father. Hughes notes that both he and Otto are given negative connotations in Sylvia’s work, saying, “To find yourself so tangled with me – / Rising from your coffin, a big shock.” Additionally, he writes, “I understand – you never could have released her. / I was a whole myth too late to replace you. / This underworld, my friend, is her heart’s home.” Here, Hughes writes of himself replacing Otto in Sylvia’s eyes—Hughes believes that he became the central controlling male figure in her life after the passing of her father. He refers to Otto as ‘my friend,’ which shows that he may not identify Sylvia’s perception of Otto as entirely truthful. 

In October, Plath’s viewpoint towards Hughes seems to have ultimately shifted, and all the love that she once held for him seems to have been shed. This is evident in a letter to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, where Plath writes, “Ted has reverted to pretty much what he was when I met him— “the greatest seducer in Cambridge”. Later in this same letter to her therapist, Plath writes, “he & this Assia are such a perfect match I laugh in my guts when I think of them married. They look exactly alike… She is his twin sister, & like his sister, barren, uncreative, a real vamp.” Near the end of the letter, Plath remarks, Ted “was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!” While Plath would take her own life only a mere five months later, her internal suppression may have just been another way to spite Hughes.

In January 1963, the month before she took her own life, “Sylvia consulted her [general practitioner] complaining of depression, and for the first time told him of a serious suicidal attempt she had made ten years earlier.” Dr. John Horder, her general practitioner, prescribed her “an antidepressant (monoamine oxidase inhibitor), arranged to keep in daily contact and found a nurse to visit her daily at home. Having first tried to arrange a hospital bed at short notice, he then instead got her a psychiatric outpatient appointment.” In Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath, author Paul Alexander offers that the specific medication that was prescribed to Plath would take up to three weeks to take effect, therefore, the medicine offered no relief to Plath in her final days.In The Savage God, Alvarez writes about a conversation he had with another editor in the days leading up to Plath’s death:

Later that month I met a literary editor of one of the big weeklies. He asked me if I had seen Sylvia recently.

“No. Why?”

“I was just wondering. She sent us some poems. Very strange.”

“Did you like them?”

“No,” he replied, “too extreme for my taste. I sent them all back. But she sounds in a bad state. I think she needs help.

On the morning of February 11, 1963, the nurse that Dr. Horder had arranged to visit was having trouble entering Plath’s flat—she found that “the name of the patient, Sylvia Plath Hughes, did not appear on either doorbell, and [the nurse, Myra] Norris was not even sure that she was at the correct address.” After poking around the property for a few minutes, Norris “spotted the two children crying at their bedroom window” and rapidly called over a builder that was at work down the block to help her gain entry into the property. Only an hour and a half after Norris was scheduled to begin her shift, “Horder pronounced Plath dead at ten-thirty” that morning.

In a letter to Plath’s Smith College friend, Hughes wrote, “That’s the end of my life. The rest is posthumous.” Almost immediately after Plath’s death, Hughes chose to move in with Wevill, who assisted him in caring for Frieda and Nicholas. Multiple biographers have noted that the children found Wevill asleep in Plath’s bed just the day after her death, but this has never been verified. At the time of her suicide, Wevill was carrying Hughes’ child but got an abortion soonafter. Elizabeth Sigmund, a close friend of Plath, recounts in an op-ed for The Guardian that when she went to visit Frieda and Nicholas a month after Plath’s death, the childrens’ nanny told her, “‘She’s having an operation and will be back soon.’ I realised that Sylvia would have known of Assia’s pregnancy, and that the thought of Assia giving birth to Ted’s child might have offered a further explanation of Sylvia’s final ability to face the future.” Days after the two year anniversary of Plath’s suicide, Wevill gave birth to a baby girl, who was nicknamed Shura. During this time, Wevill was still married to David, and Shura took his last name rather than Hughes’—her biological father. Soonafter, David and Assia separated, but remained legally married until Assia’s imminent suicide. 

As with his relationship with Assia during his marriage to Plath, Hughes continued to have affairs with other women. One of these women, Susan Alliston, was featured by name in Hughes’ “18 Rugby Street”, the title referring to the address of the home that he and Plath shared. Hughes writes, “Three of them in your grave, before Susan / Could pace that floor above night after night / (Where you and I, the new rings big on our fingers / Had warmed our wedding night in the single bed) / Crying alone and dying of leukaemia.” Alliston lived in the apartment above Hughes and Plath, and ended up dying of Hodgkins lymphoma in 1969 in the same hospital that Plath was taken to once she was pronounced dead. Alliston, however, had not just entered the picture, but was engaged in an affair with Hughes the night before Plath killed herself. 

Potentially Hughes’ most emotionally-charged poem is “Last Letter”, which was published after Hughes’ death. Hughes’ widow Carol Orchard passed it on to author Melvyn Bragg, who published it in a 2010 edition of the New Statesman magazine. In “Last Letter”, Hughes contemplates Plath’s last night alive, saying, “What happened that night? Your final night.” The last letter, referred to in the poem’s title, is implied to be a somewhat suicide note, and with Plath destroying it before he could read it, Hughes struggles with understanding its unresolved contents: “Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray, / With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?”. He continues, labelling both Alliston and Plath as “two mad needles… / refashioning me / Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other / With their self-caricatures”. Here, Hughes’ two lovers are both aware of the other’s romantic involvements and fight for his attention, criticizing and defaming each other when in his presence. Still, Hughes holds a hesitant perspective, offering that he may be unable to pick between “My dellarobbia Susan” and Plath. However, Plath dies before he has an opportunity to choose. Guilt-ridden, he writes:

I count

How often you walked to the phone-booth

…

You walk unable to move, or wake, and are

Already nobody walking

Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill

Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.

Before midnight. After midnight. Again

Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

For the first time, Hughes seems to show an undertone of responsibility for her mental state, reflecting on Plath wandering around their neighborhood the night before she took her own life, calling and recalling Hughes with no answer. He closes the piece with a heartbreaking anecdote: “Cooly delivered its four words / Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’” Filled with regret, he feels both helpless and at fault for not noticing the warning signs and failing to pick up her calls. The mystery regarding the last letter she wrote to him also holds true in relation to the goings-on of her last night alive. In this piece, Hughes seems to mourn his and Plath’s life together, taking a far more concilliatory tone than is seen with any of his addresses to his late wife. 

After Plath died, he broke things off with Alliston in order to try a new life with Wevill, but by the following Christmas he’d revived the affair, all the while assuring Wevill that Alliston was “out.” Even after his wife committed suicide partly in response to his infidelity, Hughes continued to “triangulat[e] women in this way for the rest of his life.” Wevill wrote in her personal journal of Hughes, “in bed he smells like a butcher”, referring both to his “sexual ferociousness” but scholars of Hughes and Wevill believe that this line could also refer to Hughes’ infidelity, and the smell of other women on him. The other two women that Hughes was actively seeing were Brenda Hedden, a social worker in an open marriage, and Carol Orchard, a woman twenty years younger than him, who he married a year and a half after Wevill’s murder-suicide. Cooke includes that in Hughes’ own journal he differentiated between the women by referring to them as “A, B, & C”. In Wevill’s last year of life, “Hughes gave Wevill and Hedden heart-shaped gold bracelets that were each inscribed with their name, together with the same love poem.” In Sigmund’s aforementioned op-ed, she details Assia’s eventual suicide, which Sigmund only found out about after the fact: “In March 1969, Assia dragged a bed into the kitchen of her Clapham flat, dissolved sleeping tablets in a glass of water and gave the drink to her daughter before draining the rest herself. Then she turned on the gas stove and got into bed with the child.” In contrast to Plath, Wevill took the life of her child with Hughes in addition to her own. “The contrasts between Plath and Wevill—between their minds, their works, their looks, their deaths—were henceforth inescapable”, writes Cooke, one of which being “Plath's last maternal act, leaving milk and bread for her children, before gassing herself is contrasted to Assia's apparent heartlessness in taking her daughter's life along with her own.” 

Even after death, Wevill and Plath remain close—their final resting places sit only a quarter mile apart from each other in a West Yorkshire churchyard, just down the hill from the home that Hughes moved to once Wevill had passed. The ashes of Wevill, along with those of hers and Hughes’ illegitimate daughter, were however buried under the roots of an oak tree, their initials said to be carved into the wood by Hughes himself. In a copy of her unofficial will, she wrote that she wished her epitaph to read “Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile”. 

In Paul Alexander’s 2003 Plath biography Rough Magic, he writes that in the days after her death, “Ted traveled with Sylvia’s body to Yorkshire, where he had decided she would be buried in his family’s cemetery in Heptonstall. The next day, in the early afternoon of February 16, a brief service was held at the Hugheses’ local church.” Alexander notes that the service was led by a priest that had no knowledge of Plath or Hughes, its only attendants being Hughes’ parents and Plath’s brother and his wife. Plath’s children did not attend, nor did Hughes’ sister Olwyn, who became the literary agent for Plath’s estate until her Ted Hughes’ death in 1998. 

Alexander includes that Plath’s mother Aurelia was too “Shattered by the blow of her daughter’s death” to be able to fly across the ocean. In a 1979 New York Times interview, Aurelia Plath said of the attention she had received just following the death of her daughter:

‘Can you imagine what it is like to relive it over and over and over again for 16 years? … It is only because I've been compelled to. It is because I have the name Plath. Anytime I meet anyone, the same thing happens. It happens to my daughter-in-law, their two girls, my son, of course. I was on Nantucket recently having a joyous time with a dear friend. She introduced me at a party and the other woman said: 'Oh...you are, aren't you?' I just can't escape it. The warm greeting until the name strikes them and they think of 'The Bell Jar,' and of Mrs. Greenwood, the uncaring mother. 'Oh so you are Mrs. Greenwood,' they say. She didn't understand. She didn't go to see her daughter.’

For Sylvia Plath, her suicide has become just as synonymous with he name as her poetry.

Plath’s gravestone, placed five years after her burial, reads “Sylvia Plath Hughes”, the epitaph underneath bearing “Even Amidst Fierce Flames / The Golden Lotus Can Be Planted”, a reference to Wu Cheng’En’s sixteenth century Buddhist novel Journey to the West. It has been long debated as to whether Plath would have wanted the inclusion of her partner’s last name on her gravestone. According to a 1988 Los Angeles Times article, the Hughes surname has been repeatedly scraped off of her gravestone, saying “Nobody knows who is tampering with her grave, but some suspect feminist activists of erasing “Hughes” from the stone in the belief that Plath’s marriage to British poet Ted Hughes contributed to her misery by turning her into a housewife.” 

In March 1998, Hughes published Birthday Letters, a final praise of his late wife. During the time of publishing, he was suffering from terminal colon cancer, which he would succumb to in October of that year. Birthday Letters is an ode to Plath, with almost every piece addressed to her, her memory haunting the narrator between each line. “Visit” is Hughes’ personal reaction to rereading her old work, given the hindsight of what eventualized. He writes, “Ten years after your death / I meet on a page of your journal, as never before, / The shock of your joy”. He also touches on the reaction of their young children, writing, “In the silent house, asked, suddenly: / ‘Daddy, where’s Mummy?’ The freezing soil / Of the garden, as I clawed it.” He ends the piece, “You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story.” Here, he focuses on what remains of their relationship: their writings. Although Plath has already left the world, he sees her life and the continuation of it as a story to share, one that only he has the insight to successfully accomplish. Next, Hughes’ “The 59th Bear” is a response work to Plath’s short story “Fifty-Ninth Bear” from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, wherein he writes, “Squeezed the possible blood out of it / Through your typewriter ribbon. / At that time / I had not understood / How the death hurtling to and fro / Inside your head, had to alight somewhere / And again somewhere, and had to be kept moving, / And had to be rested / Temporarily somewhere.” In Plath’s piece, a bear appears “out of the dark” and kills her husband. While most of her work seems to shift her personal life into metaphor, Plath stated this work was purely a fictional “fantasy” and was not inspired by her marriage. However, Hughes warps Plath’s story, portraying the deadly bear as the mental illness that corrupted his wife, a large and lethal presence that cannot be fought. In “Fidelity”, Hughes paints himself as a nobleman, with the task of staying sexually loyal as a test towards knighthood, and Plath as the prize to be won. He writes, “What / Knighthood possessed me there? I think of it / As a kind of time that cannot pass, / That I never used, so still possess.” Within this piece, he also alludes to himself as The Hanged Man, a traditional Major Arcana card used in Tarot, using phrases like “Just hanging around, courting you”, “Free of University I dangled”, and “Gutted”. Here, Hughes feels suspended, seeing that the only way for his life to move forward is if he wins over the “sisterly comforting” Plath, painted as a chaste “lovely girl” as opposed to the “wilder” and “Plump and pretty” girls that made themselves available to him. The resistance of the other girls serves as a test of faith for his fidelity in marriage, the tension between him and these choices shining through.

Hughes edited and published Ariel, a collection of Plath’s poems, two years after her death. However, he omitted more than 12 poems that were included in Plath’s original manuscript, the anthology that would become Ariel. He was criticized for this action, with many saying that he was “attempting to preserve his reputation”. Ariel: The Restored Edition, was released in 2005, a version that contained all poems that Plath intended to include, with a foreward written by Frieda Hughes. In this, Frieda says:

After my mother's suicide and the publication of Ariel, many cruel things were written about my father that bore no resemblance to the man who quietly and lovingly (if a little strictly and being sometimes fallible) brought me up — later with the help of my stepmother. All the time, he kept alive the memory of the mother who had left me, so I felt as if she were watching over me, a constant presence in my life.

Hughes was also vilified for his role in editing her journals, especially for his disposing of her last journal, later saying that he burned the journal because he “did not want her children to have to read it”.  In “Ted Hughes’ Role in Editing Sylvia Plath’s Work”, Georgeta Obilisteanu, PhD writes, “As Hughes wrote, making an awkward distinction between himself as impartial editor and partial husband, he destroyed one or two journals which covered maybe two or three months, the last months of his late wife’s life. The explanation that he didn’t want her children to see them pertains to Hughes the husband, not to Hughes the editor.” The entries that he did include in the 1982 Journals of Sylvia Plath were heavily edited and only included around forty percent of her journal entries. Later, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath was published in 2000, which added the remaining unauthorized entries from the last twelve years of her life. It was during this time in 1984 that Hughes was named Poet Laureate, a position that he held until his death fourteen years later.

According to an interview with the Telegraph, Frieda found out about her mother’s suicide only when she turned fourteen, saying that “I was really lucky to have a father who was so determined to be as protective and caring and loving as he was.” While Frieda has tried to remain out of the public eye, she and her late brother Nicholas, who took his own life in 2009, have both remained defensive of their father. In 2003, a biographical film about Sylvia Plath’s life was released, called Sylvia—with Daniel Craig as Hughes and Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath. In an interview with The Guardian, Frieda says, "I wrote a letter to [BBC Films] saying 'No I don't want to collaborate', and they kept coming back… Why would I want to be involved in moments of my childhood which I never want to return to? I want nothing to do with this film. I will never, never in a million years, go to see it." Further, she published a poem of her own called “My Mother”, which she published in a 2003 edition of Tatler Magazine. Frieda writes, “My buried mother / Is up-dug for repeat performances. / Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven, / Orphaning children”. Additionally, Frieda, who became the literary executor of Plath’s estate after the death of her father, disallowed BBC Films to cite any of Plath’s poetry in the film. Of this, Frieda writes, “they think / I should give them my mother's words / To fill the mouth of their monster, / Their Sylvia Suicide Doll”. 

Still, in present day, the discourse surrounding Hughes for his treatment of Plath continues. In 1972, poet Robin Morgan published Monster, a book of self-proclaimed feminist poems. She opens her poem “Arraignment” with the lines, “I accuse / Ted Hughes / of … / The murder of Sylvia Plath”. Later in this piece, she reprimands Hughes for committing both “mind-rape and body-rape” against Plath as well as “making a mint by becoming her posthumous editor”, and finishes with a mention of castrating on Hughes and forcing him to kill himself. Morgan’s explosive piece highlights Plath as a victim of domestic violence and Hughes as an abuser that used his professional power to take advantage of her. Even rock band Sonic Youth released a vinyl-exclusive song in 2008 called “J’Accuse Ted Hughes” in response to Morgan’s work, which again reignited the conversation of Hughes’ reported allegations of physical harm against Plath. In response to what she referred to as “all that martyr talk”,  Olwyn says in an interview with The Guardian, “What feminists don’t take into account was how much psychological trouble she was in. She was a very difficult person with a very difficult personality. She was horribly unjust to her mother and to Ted…. She was a monster actually.” Of Morgan’s stinging Hughes-centered poems, Olwyn says, “[The biographers] didn’t take account of the fact that Ted had nursed the bloody woman for seven years. The patience that he had with her!” Similarly, Hughes once made a corresponding comment—“Tending to her insecurities was like trying to protect a fox from my own hounds while the fox bit me.”

While parsing the life of another through only glimpses and fragments, the true story of their relationship and the dissolution of it will never be fully unsheathed. In his poem “Life After Death”, Hughes writes, “What can I tell you that you do not know / Of the life after death?” Again, he uses the allusion of Tarot cards, saying, “By night I lay awake in my body / The Hanged Man”. Referencing his “Fidelity” poem, he felt suspended in waiting during his courtship of Plath, whereas after her passing, he finds that his life has been interrupted without his wife to accompany him. Together, their lives hung in a tumultuous suspension, tied together by the mutuality of their decisions. In “Life After Death”, Hughes also notes how his children “have turned, in their sleep, / Into orphans”, writing that their infant son Nicholas “accepted / The spoon in my disembodied hand / That reached through from the life that had survived you.” In the fallout of her suicide, her overwhelming presence remained as Hughes’ conducted the household’s maternal motions, tasks that should have fallen to Plath. After heartlessly engaging in multiple love affairs during his multiple marriages, Hughes attempts to rejoin Plath through compliments and praise, appreciating his wife, in death, in a way that he failed to accomplish while she was alive. For Hughes, life after Plath became a penitent afterlife of its own.