"But now you have defined the whole thing, and handed it to the public," Ted Hughes wrote to A. Alvarez after the latter published a memoir of Hughes's dead wife. Would for the widower that Alvarez had been the only one. The marriage of poets Hughes and Sylvia Plath was a lyrical ballad turned spectacular dirge that, after Plath's 1963 suicide in London, drew scores of rubbernecking scribblers like a siren lament. Deconstructing the rugged übermensch and the maenad housewife spawned its own literary subgenre (or Plathology?), and as Janet Malcolm demonstrates in her... More >>>