Jessica Vestuto on Living at Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's Boston Abode

Talk about haunted houses! At Literary Hub, Jessica Vestuto writes about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's history at 9 Willow Street in Boston. Her interest in the property intersects with the beginning of her career as a writer and became a place that she too called home. Vestuto beginnings with her hunt for housing: "When the rental agent who showed me the room learned I was in a graduate program for writing, she told me a famous writer used to live in the building. She smiled, handed me an application, and said, 'I can’t remember which one.'" Vestuto continues:

Which ones, it turns out. In 1958, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes moved to 9 Willow Street. “We’re planning to write here,” Plath wrote of the new residence in a letter to a friend. “We are investing our time & going to work like fury for the first year in our lives at nothing but writing.” During the year they lived in Beacon Hill, Plath compiled a first collection of poems and Hughes taught poetry at the University of Massachusetts. Plath received her first acceptance to The New Yorker. Hughes won the Guinness Poetry Award. This was two years into their notorious marriage and five years before Plath killed herself by inhaling oven fumes.

For years, I had a passive awareness of both poets—Plath’s suicide by kitchen appliance now a widely known fact, and the memory of Hughes, who died of a heart attack in 1998, eclipsed by judgments concerning his culpability in Plath’s death, his abuse and infidelity well-documented. I unintentionally avoided their work through multiple undergraduate poetry seminars and intentionally avoided reading them of my own volition, fearful that I might be more interested in the spectacle of their suffering than in what their suffering produced. Plath’s life in particular is the object of many readers’ fascination—the tormented, attractive young poet’s face now found cartoonized on notebooks and pencil cases at Barnes and Noble, the interest in her misery having grown so large it became marketable. Finding a writer’s biography to be equally or more compelling than this writer’s work has always felt problematic to me, juvenile even, though perhaps this feeling is due to the fact that I am a young writer with no compelling biography of my own.

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