Any book about Ted Hughes is bound either to begin or to end with the leading man in the dock. With two suicidal partners to explain, giving testimony for his part in their downfall is where Hughes has been ever since Sylvia Plath took her own life in 1963.
Ted Hughes (1930-98) was married to Carol Orchard for 28 years and lived for 35 years after Sylvia Plath’s death but he never escaped that tragedy. Robin Morgan’s notorious 1972 poem Arraignment (“I accuse/ Ted Hughes/ of . . . the murder of Sylvia Plath”) was only the most brutally candid among a battery of feminist writers who held him responsible for the sad turns of his life. “I hope each of us owns the facts