Revealed in her lost letters, how pregnant Sylvia Plath was beaten by Ted Hughes
POET Sylvia Plath accused her husband Ted Hughes of beating her two days before she miscarried their second child, according to unpublished letters.
In what academics have hailed as a fascinating insight into how their relationship disintegrated in the 1960s, Plath also claimed he wanted her dead.
The letters – written to her former psychiatrist over the last three years of her life – were put up for sale in the US by an antiquarian bookseller for £695,000.
In an extract, Plath makes what may be a reference to abuse by the late Poet Laureate: ‘I have the consolation of being no doubt the only woman who will know the early years of a charming genius. On my skin. Like a Belsen label.’
However, the collection of 14 letters has been pulled from sale in a dispute over ownership after a US college said they are part of an estate bequeathed to it.
Plath was treated by Dr Ruth Barnhouse after her first suicide attempt in 1953, before she left the States and moved to England, meeting Hughes at Cambridge, but continued to write to her.
By the early 1960s her marriage was disintegrating, but the destruction of the final volume of her journal – which Hughes said was done to protect their children – has left scholars with a gap in understanding her state of mind. She killed herself in 1963, aged 30. So there was huge interest when the letters emerged. They were amassed by a feminist scholar who reportedly claims to have been given them by Dr Barnhouse.
The auction catalogue says they will ‘change the face of Plath scholarship’ and detail ‘physical abuse and psychological torture at the hands of her husband’.
According to The Guardian, they reveal Plath’s accusation of physical abuse shortly before miscarrying their second child in 1961.
In another letter, dated October 21, 1962, Plath claimed to Dr Barnhouse that Hughes, who died in 1998, told her directly that he wished she was dead.
Seller Ken Lopez said nine of the letters represent ‘the only documents extant of that time in her life, written by Plath and seen from her perspective’.
Mr Lopez told the Daily Mail the quote in which Plath refers to knowing ‘a charming genius … on my skin’ was not the source of his claim that they detailed domestic abuse at Hughes’ hands, but agreed it could be interpreted as a reference to violence.
The letters are understood to have been removed from sale after Smith College in Massachusetts claimed they were part of Dr Barnhouse’s estate, which it said had been bequeathed to it.