Everyone hates Ted Hughes

(but I don't) // author profile vol. 1

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To this day Sylvia Plath’s grave is repeatedly vandalized by Plath admirers. They have scratched and chiseled away at “Hughes,” attempting to erase the man who shaped so much of her life (but ultimately, according to many, destroyed it).

I really hated Ted Hughes. Let me tell you, this man, this tall, handsome, brooding man, was the villain in my story. Because my story, I thought, was Plath’s story. I’ve written before about my teenaged obsession with the poet Sylvia Plath and how, to this day, I have Mass said for her. I adore Sylvia. Yes, I call her Sylvia. We’re that close.

Sometimes you ‘meet’ someone, an author or a character in a book, at just the right moment in your life that you see some sort of mirror there. It is a clearer and more precise mirror than the one in your bathroom, and much more vivid than the emotional scrawling in your journal. Here is someone who understands.

Sylvia was that for me.¹ A woman who ‘wanted it all’ - a determined student, steely writer, both the high-flying blonde of her famous ‘platinum summer’ and the serious student at Cambridge on a Fulbright. She pursued the handsome and rugged wild poet, married him, and tried to build a life with him - “books, babies, and beef stews!”²

But Ted left Sylvia, had possibly even abused her, and the story was that clear and that simple in my mind. Sylvia was the misunderstood genius suffering first under the imposing weight of her father’s ghost³ and then her husband’s towering fame. I didn’t share her exact struggles, but I was a woman in the world and I was enraged on her behalf.

Besides the obvious sins - the infidelity, the anger, the jealousy - Ted Hughes had burned the journals from the months before she died.

I hated Ted.

And then… I read his work.