Did poet Ted Hughes’s deserve the hate?

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Ted Hughes faced immense backlash from the feminist movement following Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963 and Assia Wevill's suicide in 1969.

Do you think he deserved it? I’m asking because someone was taking to me about this and she thought he did, while I didn’t think he deserved all the vitriol which at times included death threats, physical attacks on his property, and being branded a murderer.

I felt very sorry for his children Frieda and Nicholas, as they both suffered and Nicholas later died by suicide, and Shura, who was murdered by her mother Assia Wevill at age 4.

I am NOT defending Ted Hughes for being an abuser. This is my first time on the feminist board. I can see why people don’t post on it!!!

His children? I only read about it today, so may have something wrong, but wasn't SP living with and caring for their children? As for reconciliation...wasn't he in bed with his mistress the night SP committed suicide? Also, on average, it takes a woman seven attempts to permanently leave her abuser.

I sincerely doubt the man was trying to do anything other than protect himself, by destroying SP's writings.

OK, so why do you seem to be so invested in being a TH apologist? He's a poet some of whose work I like very much, though it's also uneven, as you'd expect in such a long career. I met him once and found him a total fishing bore, plus he was trying to put the moves on a couple of the female postgrads who'd been asked to escort him around campus. I've no particular grudge with him, but he certainly did Plath's posthumous reputation a disservice by the heavy-handed re-edit of Ariel, and destroying work is unforgivable.

Then what are you doing? Because it seems like you're defending him.

@angieloumc I meant their children!!! It was too late to edit it.

Respectfully, it's a board for debate. This is debating.

Thanks OP, but I did my thesis on Sylvia Plath so anything you’re telling me, which by the way sounds like you’ve read it in a pro Hughes article or maybe the one sided BBC documentary on him, isn’t anything I don’t already know.
Maybe he was a great dad but you don’t get a medal for being that, it’s what as a father you’re meant to be. But he certainly was a terrible husband. He left Plath alone and isolated many times to go off and do his own thing. Yes she was mentally unwell and Assia Wevill possibly was too but he certainly abused, gaslit and was terribly cruel to both of them.

I think, based purely on the people I know with whom this has come up, that your emotional position on this depends whether you read the bell jar or got into Hughes' poetry first.

You can argue about facts forever and clearly based just on the responses here you can come down one either side easily enough.

But where your heart as it were sits depends on if you see Hughes as 'worthy' based on his poetry or if you can't get over the faults of the man himself because his poetry didn't get it's hooks into when you were 14. And vice versa with Plath.

Not quail, believe me I’ve heard worse. You’d think what appears to be a grown up thread on a poet and his wife and children might warrant proper discussion, but you came in kicking, talking down a view that differs from your own. Reminder - grown ups have different views and still manage to live alongside each other respectfully.

Not entirely his fault that his wife was total fruit loop. Yeah he had an affair (probably driven to it partly by how she was) but that doesn't usually lead to people killing themselves. As for Wevill, she murdered her own daughter, thats the inadmissible crime here.

I'm an academic in Eng Lit, @Loopylalalou. This is what a debate looks like, People don't generally try to soften their argument in case it upsets the other person.

Assia Wevill was concerned no one would look after Shura.

”And I couldn’t leave little Shura by herself. She’s too old to be adopted.” (A Lover of Unreason)

@TeaWithASplashOfMilkPlease

Any man who hits a woman is automatically the one in the wrong. No matter how annoying she is, how mad, or how much more successful.

I'm not arguing with your basic point, but on a point of pedantry he was much more successful than she during her lifetime.

@SinisterPeaches I thought debate was allowing an audience to come to their own conclusion after listening to differing opinions. Silly me!

You're a participant, not an 'audience member'. If you were an audience member, you'd be simply reading the thread, not commenting, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Here I disagree with you, OP. It is true that they were still married when she died. It is easy to believe that he would want to protect their children, and after her death he certainly seems to have been a good father to them.

Your first sentence is the one that makes me cringe. I don't know what the technical details were of her will, or even if she had one, and it would certainly have been assumed by most people that someone who was a minor poet at the time of her death did not have an important literary legacy to leave, but Hughes was experienced with literature. He must have recognised the quality of her work and the level of academic attention she would have received later. As a pp said, there were many other options open to him than burning her journals and reworking some of her work.

In terms of writing, I personally prefer most of his to most of hers (probably for the reasons another pp speculates) and I did my MA dissertation on Hughes (in 1973 so before it got as dull as some of his later work). But many male writers have treated women badly (see for example Dickens and also Byron, who did the unstable Caroline Lamb no favours) without putting their work beyond the pale of approval and enjoyment.

Ah Schrödinger’s father: one so great to the children with SP that he visited and they don’t have a bad word to say about him, yet so bad to the child of AW that she killed her?

OP why are you invested in this?

I swear if SP was alive and posting in AIBU today she'd be under attack.

'You sound like hard work.'
'You married him, knowing he was a womaniser with a shocking reputation. And now you're complaining?'
'Well if my successful husband asked me to help with a little bit of typing in order to boost the family finances, I'd be happy to help. But you do you.'
'You sound very entitled. I'd be perfectly happy with my husband's company. What do you mean you want a phone so you can talk to other people?'
'I'd wait till the children are at school. Until then regard your writing as a hobby. You can do it when they are asleep.'
'You sound as bad as he is. You really put yourself in the wrong shouting and lashing out.'
'Had you ever thought he might be on the spectrum?'

As in discussing opinions and viewpoints?
Or attacking people asking different questions to you, or offering different perspectives?
Which is surely what debating allows?

He was the administrator of her estate, so it was entirely up to him what he did with her literary works.

I haven't attacked anyone.

That's true. I'm talking about him as someone who understood the quality and nature of literature, not as an administrator. I think those acts were just as unforgivable as his physical abuse.

I’m not invested. I find it very interesting and decided to ask one question on here!!!

Yes, because they were still legally married, though separated, and that's exactly what many critics find unforgivable, that he essentially was in a position he could exploit to become her censor. The man whose behaviour had contributed to her suicide had the licence to destroy work, rearrange a collection she'd planned, remove one third of the poems of Ariel, suppress poems like 'The Rabbit Catcher' and 'The Jailer' which depicted him in a negative light etc etc.

Literary executor is a hugely important role, as is editor, especially with someone like Plath who died with a lot of unpublished work. But if you're looking for a selfless, disinterested editor who will do a good job in ensuring a dead woman's work goes before the public as she'd planned it, it's not exactly outrageous to suggest that this person shouldn't be her ex, who appears as a main character in those works.

A less self-interested man would have put this in the hands of someone who wasn't personally involved (and I don't mean his sister Olwyn who took over later), and put the last journals safely in an archive under embargo.

I presume he did what he thought was best for all of them.