Sylvia Plath's Allure Considered by Emily Van Duyne

Emily Van Duyne discusses her process of writing (and researching) her forthcoming book on Sylvia Plath, aptly titled Loving Sylvia Plath. "Each time I left the Charles Woodruff Library at Emory University during my week-long visit there, I set off the alarm," writes Van Duyne. "I carried nothing but a tote bag with my laptop, cell phone, wallet, and one book—Charles Newman’s The Art of Sylvia Plath, a discarded library book from the early 1970s." More: 

This last was the culprit. The librarian at the front desk ran it through a scanner intended to de-library it. Still, the alarm sounded. Still, I walked quietly backwards, removing the book from, and handing over, my bag. Plath in hand, apologizing.

I went to Emory in November 2019, because Ted Hughes’s papers are there, and I needed to round out several chapters of my forthcoming book, Loving Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Plath were famously married from 1956 until her suicide in 1963, but estranged at the time of her death, with Plath actively seeking divorce. Because Plath died intestate (without a will), Hughes inherited all of her published—and, importantly, unpublished—writing. Loving Sylvia Plath deals with the ways Hughes used the editing and censorship of his late wife’s work to construct an image of a maniacal, death-obsessed Plath that was simultaneously a publishing phenomenon.

The Emory archive contains the bulk of his correspondence related to this editing and publishing—so, three days after Halloween, I flew south to Atlanta, my stomach in knots. I felt like I was facing the twisted history of Plath, Hughes, and the many fans and scholars who have tried to write about the whole complex mess. Until his death in 1998, Hughes was an immovable force—feminist scholars, in particular, were anathema to him, and he often forbade access to Plath’s work, or permission to quote it, to a range of writers. And while I have been sniffing around this story since I was a very young woman, I have too often (and probably too easily) been put off the scent—plenty of friends, and teachers, had told me I was wrong about Hughes’s character and his role in creating Plath’s iconic image. What if those people were right?

Read on at Literary Hub.