- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Viking USA (Oct 14 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670031879
- ISBN-13: 978-0670031870
- Product Dimensions: 23.7 x 16 x 3.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 667 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#1,080,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #27 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( P ) > Plath, Sylvia
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Dianne Middlebrook launches Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, appropriately, with the birth of the poets’ lives together. Through her retelling of the historic moment of their first meeting, Middlebrook sets the balanced, literate, and brutally honest tone that she maintains throughout the book. According to Middlebrook, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s first encounter was violent and almost mythic, punctuated with kisses and biting. In 112 days they were married. Together, as Middlebrook shows, they formed a unique literary bond. They remained aggressive intellectual and erotic partners. But, six years later, Hughes left Plath and their two children for another woman. She committed suicide shortly after, while Hughes would go on to a long and successful career as a poet and as Plath’s literary executor.
What Middlebrook brings to this story, outside of the almost voyeuristic details gleaned from letters, diaries, interviews, and past biographies, is a scholarly commitment to infuse the reading of Hughes and Plath’s marriage with a reading of their poetry and prose. In less capable hands, using literature to reconstruct biography can lead to an undisciplined avoidance of real historical research. But Middlebrook drafts the writings to bolster her understanding of the couple in sophisticated ways that link their private language to their public statements in published works (especially Hughes’ Birthday Letters). At the same time, Middlebrook remains deeply aware that Hughes and Plath worked to re-construct themselves through their writings, often with conflicting self-portraits, for posterity. She is comfortable letting their contradictions exist side by side.
Her Husband is wonderfully told; it is difficult to imagine how this narrative of the marriage could be surpassed. One only hopes that Middlebrook will have the stamina to amend her own work—if necessary—when Hughes’s most private papers are made public in 2023. --Patrick O’Kelley
From Publishers Weekly
Joining the recent spate of books about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, all of which concern the sources of their poetry and their dysfunctional marriage, Middlebrook's is sure to be the gold standard. Astutely reasoned, fluidly written and developed with psychological acuity, the work is a sympathetically balanced assessment of two lives that flamed brightly with the incandescent fire of creative genius. Accessing newly available materials in the Hughes archives at Emory University, Middlebrook (Anne Sexton) offers fresh evidence of Hughes's beliefs in shamanism, psychic telepathy and the predatory instinct, and she breaks new ground in tracing the couple's interactive creative relationship, suggesting that neither would have produced his or her best poetry without the other. She shows how Hughes's faith in mysticism not only led him to believe that his marriage to Plath was fated, but also acted as a counterweight, inspiring him to seek his muse in erotic entanglements with other women. She conjectures that Plath, too, needed erotic aggression to release her creative impulses, demonstrating the particulars of her struggle with the conflicting demands of motherhood. And she effectively demolishes Hughes as the demon who destroyed Plath, stating that during their marriage he displayed "a high level of tolerance toward what other people considered... antisocial, crazy... behavior"; she also writes that Plath's emotional breakdown was a recurrence of the clinical depression that occasioned her first attempt at suicide in 1953. In the end, the book is most valuable in interpreting Hughes's sources of poetic inspiration and emotional behavior, and in providing a balanced assessment of the legacy of a troubled marriage and the works of art it engendered.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Overrated!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Her Husband (Hardcover)
I like Diane Middlebrook's writing, but this book is not one of her best. In general I thought it thin and shallow, and not very well structured. She didn't seem to have a point except gossiping and giving us a bland narration of the events. I felt like a voyeur reading this. I really felt she needed to do more analysis rather than just report on Plath and Hughes. For example, why did the birth of their son Nicholas send Hughes into such a tizzy? Its evident from several sources she cites that Hughes rejected the child unaccountably, and it seems that was a key event in the unravelling of their relationship. Well, why? She merely cites this evidence without analyzing it. Why did Hughes want "ten daughters" but could not tolerate one son? It seems rather obvious that the guy couldn't bear to have a male "competitor" in the family. If you're going to do a biography, then don't hold back! I felt Middlebrook repeatedly dropped the ball on a full analysis of Hughes and his psychology/behaviour. For example, the way he treated Plath's estate was mind-boggling. Just randomly leaving it floating around his house so others could steal parts of it? Why does she not comment more on this! What a flagrant disrespect this shows for Sylvia Plath! That material should have been stored properly, at the very least! I've never read any in depth narrative of their marriage: this is the first one. I must say I formed an extremely negative view of Hughes from it--he seemed like a pure egomaniac underneath it all, and Middlebrook simply won't take a stance towards the evidence. Certainly, one could formulate a stronger critical stance without going to the extreme of blaming him for the behavior of the women who attached themselves to him. She seems blinded by a need to defend him while on the contrary, most of the material she cites paints a much more negative picture. It bothers me that in some passages of the book Middlebrook celebrates the way Plath's poems after Hughes left her were able to help her heal and take responsibility for attaching herself to "dominant males," and for "collaborating in her own oppression" --yet then she goes on to (subtly) defend Hughes. Well which is it? She's read "Daddy"--it seems that Middlebrook wants to grant a feminist power to Plath for that poem and its sentiments but at the same time completely deny their truth. "Oh, he wasn't really that bad." In general, a fuller account of the psychology and dynamics of both the main protagonists is needed in this book. Plath, also, is often rendered in a shallow and gossipy light. I felt Middlebrook didn't have a clue about how to analyze the way Plath and Hughes helped each other write, and what the function of writing was in their relationship. I've read much much better analyses of creative marriages (i.e., by Susan Rubin Suleiman for example.) This was just superficial. Another thing I found problematic was how Middlebrook does not do a better analysis of some of the events leading to Plath's suicide, such as, the publication of the Bell Jar. Why did this trigger Plath's last depression, as the evidence suggests, and why did Hughes resent that "damn" book so fiercely? The argument that it was just "brain chemistry" I found not convincing at all! Again and again I felt Middlebrook just drops out pieces of information but does not fully discuss them. I think her bio of Anne Sexton is a much better book which I have read several times. This one I will never read again. For a better analysis of Sylvia Plath I think Rose's Haunting of Sylvia Plath is excellent.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage,
By
This review is from: Her Husband (Hardcover)
The marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has been written about for decades, the riveting aspects of their relationship splashed tabloid style across the pages of popular biographies and recorded for posterity in more scholarly tomes of journals and letters. But Middlebrook (Anne Sexton) offers the reader and Plath/Hughes-ophile something new, exploring their working relationship in terms of their intimate one. Looking into what she refers to as their "call and response" poetry, Middlebrook discovers how some of Hughes's and Plath's most famous poems are linked with or responses to each other's writing. She traces the roots of their literary relationship to the beginning of their romance and continues through to Hughes's death in 1998. By opening up their poetic life, she finds what drew them together and what, in turn, keeps readers fascinated with them. Her impartiality to this polarizing subject is refreshing and perhaps aided by her bicontinental status. Recommended for all literature collections.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't bother reading anything else!,
By
This review is from: Her Husband (Hardcover)
Having read just about everything on the Plath/Hughes partnership I have to say that Diane Middlebrook's book is simply the best in the lucid intelligence and even-handedness with which she tackles a subject which has hitherto excited a great deal of sensationalistic biography and shallow "analysis" . Her understanding of both poets' work and placement within the culture is a tour de force. I can't praise it highly enough!
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