‘I am simply sick, physically sick, without you’: Plath’s love letters to Hughes revealed
FIFTEEN passionate love letters from Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes are to be published for the first time, throwing new light on one of the most famous marriages of the 20th century.
Plath wrote the letters when she was studying at Cambridge University, fresh from their honeymoon. They had been apart for a few days, a separation she described as “this huge whistling hole in my guts and heart”.
In one intense passage, she wrote: “I think if anything ever happened to you, I would really kill myself…”
The letters have been in the private collection of Frieda Hughes since her father’s death in 1998, unknown even to Plath scholars. They are included in The Letters of Sylvia Plath, a collection of the writer’s correspondence published by Faber later this month. The first volume is serialised in The Daily Telegraph today. Over the course of three weeks in October 1956, Plath wrote daily to her “Dearest Teddy”.
The couple were living apart as Plath had begun her second year at Cambridge, leaving Hughes in Yorkshire. They had wed secretly in June after a whirlwind courtship, and Plath worried that the authorities would withdraw her Fulbright scholarship if they learnt she was married. Fierce outpourings of love are mixed in with the domestic detail of student life – trips to the launderette, plans for tutorials, suppers of cream crackers and cheap wine. “I drank the last of the vinegary chilean burgundy and I love you,” she wrote of their first night apart.
Plath also talked about their respective careers, encouraging Hughes in his work and sharing the “wonderful and incredible” news that her poems were to be published. As the days went by, her longing for him became almost unbearable, and the language foretold darker times ahead: “I am simply sick, physically sick, without you … I am living in a kind of death-in-life …”
Hughes has been demonised by devotees of Plath, who blame him for her suicide. In February 1963, aged 30, she killed herself as her young children lay sleeping in the next room.
Earlier this year, letters from Plath to Dr Ruth Barnhouse, her psychiatrist, came to light, in which she alleged that Hughes was physically and psychologically abusive in the last years of their marriage. Hughes’s widow, Carol, said the claims were “as absurd as they are shocking to anyone who knew Ted well”. In the foreword to the book, Frieda Hughes praises her father and writes that her parents “are as married in death as they once were in life”.