When Sylvia Plath, a 23-year-old American poet studying at Cambridge, met British poet Ted Hughes, then 25, at a party, it was instant attraction.
They were married less than four months later, on June 16, 1956.
Fatal attraction: Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes at Cambridge University and married him only months later
Below are newly-found letters written by Sylvia Plath, published exclusively by The Daily Mail.
In them, she vividly describes her joyful married life with Ted Hughes — and the call from his mistress that brought it to a shattering end…
To Aurelia Plath
(Sylvia’s mother)
Thursday, November 29, 1956
My whole life has suddenly a purpose; I really am convinced [Ted] is the only person in the world I could ever love; my demands are so high — for health, brilliance, creativity, faithfulness — all those qualities that seldom, if ever, go together & he has all & much more.
Monday, December 10
I can hardly bear to have him away for the whole day. Ted is the most wonderful man that ever lived — far above any dreams I ever had!
To Marcia B. Stern
(An American friend since college days)
Saturday, December 15
Happier times: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on their honeymoon in Paris
I simply couldn’t imagine myself married, at least not to anybody I’d ever met. And then one blustery Saturday night last winter I walked into this wild literary party given for a new magazine — I’d read it, & was awestruck and admiring of one poet’s poems.
I met all the other writers — little scrawny midgets — & saw this great looming ferocious man across the room. ‘Who’s he?’ said I.
Well, he is now my husband. Ironically, he’d read some of my poems before meeting me, & there was a sudden sound of hurricanes in my ears & I just knew.
I found Ted living in a condemned London slum & working as a reader for J. Arthur Rank, saving money to go to Australia. He was very simply the only man I’ve ever met whom I never could boss; he’d bash my head in.
We had the most incredible spring in Cambridge — Ted is a crack shot & fisherman, discus thrower & can read horoscopes like a professional; he shoots rabbits & I stew them. Oh he is a lovely one. Both of us write like fury & are each others [sic] best critics.
I’m the only married undergraduate, woman, in Cambridge (they don’t think you can cook & cogitate at the same time, generally), & we found a cheap flat right on the edge of the Grantchester meadows with river & cows & a job opened for Ted teaching English & drama to a secondary modern boys school of near cretins — about 13 to 14 years (many borderline juvenile delinquents) & he is great at it — terrifies them into admiration, has them writing Audenesque ballads, reading Russian history, building bullrings in cardboard etc.
Sylvia Plath with her children Nicholas and Frieda
[Ted] is incredibly exactly the sort of person I’ve always needed but never thought could exist all in one frame — a big, 6 foot 2 strong brute with dark hair, in great unwieldy amounts, & green-blue-brown eyes, depending on weather, & sings ballads, knows all Shakespeare by heart; we read aloud, hike, write & you know all about how magnificent it is to have someone who speaks the perfectly same language & learns all the time with you so each day there is more & more to share & look at & love.
Well it is great & beautiful. We will always no doubt be very poor, but we had a Mediterranean summer on just nothing, vomiting back across the choppy channel without a shilling to stay with Ted’s dear parents in the Yorkshire moors, hiking to Wuthering Heights & eating rabbits, wild rabbits.
I am convinced Ted is the only man in the world I could ever speak to with my whole self or love and day by day it gets better & richer.
[He] is just 26, & I am convinced will be the best poet since Yeats & Dylan Thomas. Eventually. He has got raging power & violence combined with amazing discipline & a great sense of humor. Oh my.
Now, at last, we are in our own place, with our own grubby stove, & are very happy; peace, peace.
To Aurelia Plath
Wednesday, January 2, 1957
How lucky I am! We share our thoughts continually on our most intense interests, all we read, write & think; how much closer we must be than couples where the man has a business job he wants to forget when he comes home, or one the woman understands nothing about!
Sunday, February 3
[Ted] is so helpful and understanding about my studies & has made a huge chart of the English writers & their dates and stuck it up all over one wall of the bedroom where I can learn it.
Young writer: Sylvia Plath at Smith College Massachusetts, before she left for Britain as a Fulbright scholar
Sunday, February 24
The telegram came at about 10.30 yesterday morning. We gawped at it. Then light dawned, and we both jumped about, yelling & roaring like mad seals.
The telegram was from New York & said: Our congratulations that [Ted’s first book of poems] ‘Hawk In The Rain’ judged winning volume. Award letter will follow!!
No money prize is offered — just publication. You know, it is, to the day, the anniversary of that fatal party where I met Ted! I am more happy than if it was my book published! I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted’s and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all.
I am so happy his book is accepted first. It will make it so much easier for me when mine is accepted. I can rejoice then, much more, knowing Ted is ahead of me.
Tuesday, March 12, 1957
My joy in Ted increases every day. I’ve been bogged down on the 2nd of two stories I’m working on for the Ladies’ Home [Journal] market. Well, he took me on a long evening walk, listened to me talk the whole plot out, showed me what I’d vaguely felt I should change about the end.
Last night he read all 30 pages of it, word for word, unerringly pointing out awkwardness here or an unnecessary paragraph there: he is proud of the story, thinks it’s exciting & valid as a character study.
Saturday, April 13
Both of us feel very late maturers, only beginning our true lives now & need to devote the next two or three years to establishing the depths of our talent, & then having children, but not until they can’t undermine our work. Our own personalities are still squeaking new & wonderful to us.
We are going to catapult to fame, I predict. Simply because it means so little to us, & our writing & being Heard & Read is everything.
Sunday, April 28
I couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfectly wonderful husband than he if I’d tried every minute of my life. And how many poets does one find who are healthy, brilliant, articulate, handsome & without being vain or seeking public adulation?
Tuesday, May 7
Ted is the most understanding dear about my [final exams]: when he sees I’m very tired from studying he insists on doing the dishes or making morning coffee or some little thoughtful thing which makes me feel like the queen. I really feel I am one of those women whose marriage is the central experience of life, much more crucial than a religion or career or anything: and I have found the only perfect husband for me & so can write & work & do all the rest from a solid happy center.
Monday, June 17
Well, your daughter has been married a year and a day, as the fairy stories say, and hopes to be married a hundred more. We took yesterday off from relatives & spent it together on a shady hillside overlooking all the moors reminiscing about our wedding day & the tough times past & good times to come.
Work, work, that is the secret, with someone you love more than anything. We are both ideally suited temperamentally, with the same kind of life-rhythm, needing much sleep, solitude & living simply.
In the summer of 1957, Ted and Sylvia moved to the U.S., where they taught at neighbouring colleges.
To Edith & William Hughes
(Ted’s parents)
Tuesday, November 5, 1957
Ted did a wonderful job at his [poetry] reading in NYC on the 20th! He looked handsome in his dark gray wool suit with the goldy-yellow Spanish tie I gave him for his birthday over a year ago, and I persuaded him to have a haircut (!) beforehand so he looked like a Yorkshire god.
To Warren Plath
(Sylvia’s brother)
Wednesday, June 11, 1958
It seems impossible I’ve been married for two whole years, and much more impossible that I ever wasn’t married to Ted! Oh we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs & Ted with missing earlobes, but we feel so perfectly at one with our work & reactions to life & people.
Lines in the sand: Poet Sylvia Plath during a beach holiday in 1953, three years before she met Ted Hughes
To Gerald & Joan Hughes
(Ted’s brother and his wife)
Sunday, May 24, 1959
Ted is thriving. He is handsomer than ever. If he has any faults they are not shutting the icebox (a kind of subconscious revenge on American appliances) and knotting his clothes up in unknottable balls and hurling them about the floor of the room every evening before retiring.
The couple returned to Britain at the end of 1959, and their first child, Frieda, was born in London on April 1, 1960
To Aurelia Plath
Thursday, March 17, 1960
OFFICIALLY the baby is due in 10 days. This seems an enormous milestone to pass: three of us instead of two.
Ted took me to the Regent’s Park Zoo Monday afternoon & we had a wonderful time: saw the lions, tigers & birds of prey fed.
Golden girl: Sylvia Plath is photographed in Europe by an unknown cameraman around March/April 1956
Friday, April 1
Ted was there the whole time, holding my hand, rubbing my back & boiling kettles — a marvellous comfort. He’d been hypnotising me to have a short easy delivery — well, it wasn’t ‘easy’, but the shortness carried me through.
Thursday, May 5
[Frieda] gave Ted her first dazzling smile. We’re just madly in love with her.
To Gerald & Joan Hughes
Wednesday, September 28
I don’t think we’ve ever been as happy as in the last six months. The baby is so funny — singing, making faces, cuffing her teddy bear, giggling at our oafish attempts to amuse her. She eats like a pig, taking after her ma.
To Lynne Lawner
(American poet)
Friday, September 30
An immense cowlike and cabbagey calm settled on me during the last months of my pregnancy and this half year of nursing Frieda. I am just slowly surfacing. The whole experience of birth and baby seem much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage. I think being mountainous-pregnant was my favorite feeling & I wish I could prolong it.
To Aurelia Plath
Friday, February 10, 1961
Ted & I think seven is a nice magical number & both of us feel our true vocation is being father & mother to a large brood.
Sylvia and Ted have bought Court Green, a large house in North Tawton, Devon, for £3,600.
To Gerald & Joan Hughes
Saturday, 19 August
We are wild about the Devon place. We are going to be camping out for a year or so, because we have almost no furniture or carpets, and a long list of repairs. Of course we’ll probably be broke till 50 attending to our thatch, but I have grand dreams.
To Margaret Cantor
(An American friend)
Saturday, September 30
I work in my study every morning, while Ted carpenters or gardens with Frieda at his side. Then he works in the afternoon and evening while I cook and sew and pick flowers. It is a lovely rhythm.
Monday, March 12, 1962
I have the queerest feeling of having been reborn with Frieda —it’s as if my real rich happy life only started just about then.
To Ruth Beuscher
(Sylvia’s former psychiatrist in the U.S.)
Tuesday, March 27
Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born January 17th, a day-long labor, with the midwife coming in the evening to hold my hand on one side & Ted on the other, all 3 of us gossiping happily.
I had lost the baby that was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday this summer at 4 months, which would have been more traumatic than it was if I hadn’t had Frieda to console & reassure me. No apparant [sic] reason to miscarry but I had my appendix out 3 weeks after, so tend to relate the two.
Nicholas is very different from Frieda — who is lively, hectic, & a comic. He is dark, quiet, smily & very much a Hughes. I have never got such fun out of anything as my babies. We have names for at least 2 more.
To Gerald & Joan Hughes
Wednesday, May 9
It is wonderful: I open one eye about 4.30 am & see this shadowy figure rise up & vanish. Then when I wake up in earnest & go down to make breakfast at 8 there is Ted beaming over a plate of bright gleaming red-spotted trout. I can’t wait till my mother comes this summer so I can have the babies safely with her & go off with Ted to fish.
To Aurelia Plath
Thursday, June 7
I weeded all our onions & spinach & lettuce, out in the garden from sunrise to sunset, immensely happy, with Frieda digging in a little space ‘helping’ & Nicholas in the pram sun-bathing. This is the richest & happiest time of my life. The babies are so beautiful.
I’m learning to do gros point tapestry for cushion & seat covers. Wonderfully calming.
[The materials had been sent to Sylvia by Assia Wevill, who was renting the Hugheses’ flat in London with her husband. They had recently spent a weekend at Court Green.]
To Alfred Young Fisher
(English professor at Smith College, Massachusetts)
Monday, June 11
Only in England could two poets & a line of infants enjoy such worrilessness as we do on our ancient smallholding — thatch, acres of apple trees, daffodils, laburnum, owls, bees. We write in shifts, balancing babies in between, & the great vegetable garden on which we live. I do a lot for the BBC, am on a 2nd book of poems, & have had a first novel accepted over here. It is wonderful to discover one’s destiny.
To Aurelia Plath
Friday, June 15
We had the first cuttings of spinach tonight — absolutely delectable. And rhubarb & radishes. Every day we walk out together and take in the progress of our rows.
I wish now you had seen the house in its raw state. Of course there is still an immense deal to do, and my eyes are full of five-year-plans.
On July 9, Sylvia discovered Ted was having an affair with Assia Wevill
Ted Hughes’ ‘love interest’ Assia Wevill (pictured) who Plath called ‘this Weavy Asshole’ in one of her letters
To Dr Ruth Beuscher
Wednesday, July 11
‘I felt excluded from my own mother’s personal feelings at a time when her world was disintegrating and she was at her most vulnerable,’ writes Frieda Hughes (pictured: Plath)
I am suddenly at sea. What I need some good wise word on is the situation between Ted & me.
I picked up the phone & a nasty man’s voice asked if Ted could take a call from London. Ted always wants me to find out who it is, so I asked, & the man said he was sorry, the person didn’t want to say. I felt thick with my own dumbness & called Ted.
It was a woman, saying ‘Can I see you?’ He said she didn’t say her name & he had no idea who it was. I was pretty sure who it was. A girl [Assia Wevill] who works in an ad agency in London, very sophisticated, and who, with her second poet-husband, took over the lease on our London flat. We’d had them down for a weekend, and I’d walked in on them (Ted & she) tête-a-tête in the kitchen & Ted had shot me a look of pure hate. She smiled & stared at me curiously the rest of the weekend.
She is very destructive — had so many abortions when she was young she only miscarries now, wants to die before she gets old, tried to kill her first husband with a knife when he married another woman, after she herself had deceived him; now she thinks her second husband is ‘Past his best, poor thing’. Calls her first husband on the phone (getting a man to ask for him, to get round the wife) and meets him for lunch.
She kept calling a while, for no apparent reason, seeming almost speechless when she got me. Then, it seems reasonable to believe, she repeated her usual trick to get through to Ted.
Ted said ‘No’, she couldn’t see him, over the phone. But I was standing there, stunned. Then the next day, after a night of no sleep & horrid talk he took the train to London for a ‘holiday’.
Adoring: Ted Hughes cradles his month-old daughter Frieda in May 1960, as Sylvia looks tenderly on
He assured me, in a flash of his old self, that me & the children were what he really loved & would come back to & had not touched another woman since we were married. I have discontinued the phone, for I can’t stand waiting, every minute, to hear that girl breathing at the end of it, my voice at her fingertips, my life & happiness on her plate.
I suppose this all sounds very naive to you. It is, after all, what seems to happen to everybody. Only I am not, as Ted says, blasé enough. I care to a frenzy.
I could never satisfy myself by ‘getting even’ with other men: other men mean nothing to me — they are repulsive. This is one thing I want you to see: Ted is so fantastically unique — beautiful, physically wonderful, brilliant, loving, eager for me to do my own work, without (as I thought) a lie or deceit in his body. It is the lying that kills me.
He is very famous over here, and a real catch. Women are always writing him, drooling about his poems etc., begging him to tell them about his life, etc. As you may imagine, movie stars have nothing on a handsome male poet.
I suppose people would tell me I am lucky — he seems to want us as homebase still. Well, I can’t be any sort of sweet homebase for stuff that makes me gag.
I feel ugly and a fool, when I have so long felt beautiful & capable of being a wonderful happy mother and wife and writing novels for fun & money. How can I live without him? I honestly do believe I am wedded to Ted till death.
Other men seem ants compared to him. I am physically attracted to no-one else. All the complexities of my soul & mind are involved inextricably with him. And I do feel I lead an independent life — I work, write, have my own art & reputation, my babies. Yet this is dirt in my mouth if I can’t trust and love him.
And then, how can I be, if he comes back? When I am full of hate, resentment, a wish to kill this bloody girl to whom my misery is just sauce.
And how can I stop being miserable? I hate myself like this.
With love,
Sylvia
The Letters Of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956-63 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, to be published by Faber at £35 in the UK on Sept 6.
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