Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love [Paperback]

Yehuda Koren (Author), Eilat Negev (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 29, 2008

My true wife and the best friend I ever had,” wrote Ted Hughes after Assia Wevill’s 1969 suicide. Long seen as the woman who lured Hughes away from Sylvia Plath, Wevill has remained a mysterious figure. Now, for the first time Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev tell the story of Wevill’s remarkable life and the seven years she spent with Hughes before killing herself, and their daughter, in a manner that inevitably recalled Plath’s suicide six years earlier. Drawing on previously unavailable papers, including Wevill’s diaries and intimate correspondence with Hughes, Koren and Negev offer a gripping portrayal of the uneasy life the couple shared under Plath’s long shadow.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The "other woman" in the Sylvia Plath–Ted Hughes divorce receives long-delayed consideration in this assiduously researched, compulsively readable biography, where the authors draw on newly revealed primary sources. The life of thrice-married Assia Wevill (1927–1969) makes a fascinating story even before her six-year affair with Hughes and the birth of his (unacknowledged) daughter, Shura. Born in Berlin of a Russian Jewish father and a German Lutheran mother, raised in Tel Aviv, married to a British soldier in order to gain a British passport, Assia was, as the authors demonstrate, a smoldering femme fatale, albeit highly intelligent, witty and talented. While Koren and Negev (In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe) don't whitewash Assia's volatile, self-absorbed personality or her serial adulteries, they do contradict the widespread impression that Assia was the initial seducer of Hughes. This will be an important book for Hughes scholars, primarily for the authors' exclusive 1996 interview with the poet, in which he identified the poems he wrote alluding to Assia after her death, which he felt no critic had ever interpreted correctly. Newly revealed letters and interviews reinforce previous accounts of Hughes's sexual attraction and the dedicated philandering that drove two women to suicide. Photos. (Jan. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The adventurous biographical duo Koren and Negev follow their unusual Holocaust tale, In Our Hearts We Were Giants (2004), with the first complete biography of one of literature's most shadowed figures. The tragic story of Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes and subsequent suicide has been assiduously analyzed after the story of the second catastrophic relationship in Hughes' life of many love affairs finally emerged. He and Plath broke up for many painful reasons, but the catalyst was the dramatically beautiful Assia Weevil. Little has been widely known about this bright, artistic, magnetically attractive, and, finally, devastated woman of Russian Jewish and German Lutheran blood and numerous entanglements, or the nature of her tumultuous seven-year relationship with Hughes and her influence on his work, or Hughes' feelings toward their daughter. Koren and Negev, privy to previously unavailable sources, sensitively synthesize a cache of volatile information to create a fully dimensional and deeply disconcerting portrait of Weevil, who committed suicide in 1969 in the same manner as Plath but took her young daughter with her. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (January 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786721057
• ISBN-13: 978-0786721054
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #991,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #23 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( P ) > Plath, Sylvia

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about time, August 14, 2007

By 

Peter K. Steinberg "pksteinberg" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (Hardcover)

I find "A lover of unreason: The life and tragic death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes' doomed love" completely irresistible and very well researched and written. Those of us lucky enough to be at the Plath Symposium in 2002 at Indiana were teased with some of the information presented in the biography. Shock and awe spread throughout the auditorium when Koren and Negev spoke about the Plath/Hughes trip to Ireland, the deception, and the Hughes/Wevill trip to Spain. That was barely the tip of the iceberg in this very complicated situation.

The success of A Lover of Unreason in my opinion comes from presenting a very full and human picture of Assia; a woman who has been alternately ignored and raked over coals and not given sufficient attention. Here is a woman who was far, far from perfect and revered only for her uncommon and undeniable beauty, presented in a way that reminded me much of how Plath was presented in Bitter Fame. I was not expecting a book of idolatry, but I also was not expecting to find that Wevill did have some redeemable qualities. This is truly an enlightening read and brings an important piece of the Plath/Hughes puzzle closer to completion.

Assia's journals, according to the text, are in private hands. They shed some very crucial information into not just her own mind and life, but also into Plath's and Hughes?. I would not mind being introduced to those private hands! I wonder if there are any plans to publish them or to deposit them with an archive?

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fine addition to the wealth of material available about Plath and Hughes, February 28, 2008

By 

beckyjean "beckyjean" (East Granby, CT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (Paperback)

Finally, the story of Assia Gutmann Wevill is told, and what a story it is. The life of the "other woman" in the mythic marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes seems eerily like the life of Plath herself. Even the excerpts from Wevill's journals sound -- in tone, style, and content -- like they could have been ripped from Plath's own journals.

I have studied Plath's life and work for a long time, so I am always interested in any new material that is brought to light. The authors have done a fine job with this book. I have read their previous book, "In Our Hearts We Were Giants," which was well-researched and interesting, but I believe their book about Assia Wevill is more well-written; I could barely put it down.

And I have to admit -- after reading Diane Middlebrook's excellent biography of Ted Hughes, "Her Husband," I gained quite a bit of understanding and sympathy for Mr. Hughes. The biography of Assia Wevill, however, negated all of that. I will be interested to reread "Her Husband," and see if I regain any of that feeling.

And now they are all gone, all of these unbelievably intense, brilliant people, so heavily laden with self, self, self. It's likely we'll never know the truth about how everything went down. And down and down, until everybody was dead.

The saddest thing of all is the murder of Shura Wevill, four years old and innocent of everything.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biography of a woman of contradictions, March 2, 2009

By 

SusieQ (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (Kindle Edition)

I am almost completely uninterested in the somewhat tortured lives and art of the poets, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and I admit I initially picked up LOVER OF UNREASON for its startlingly beautiful cover photograph of Assia Wevill, with an outsider's curiosity about the whole affair, of which I only knew some passing facts.

This is a biography of a woman who was made up of contradictions. Shallow and selfish, yet very attractive to men and very charming; clever; a talented linguist, and later a translator of note, with artistic talent too--but all without the necessary concentration and application to create a lasting body of work. Assia was beautiful and socially skilled, yet deeply insecure and disliked people taking notice of her lovely face; this, despite a childhood with loving parents who thought the world of her and surrounded her with admiration; too much, perhaps.

The times in which Assia Wevill lived demanded that a woman marry the man she was sleeping with, so Wevill was married three times (quite shocking for her era) and apparently had numerous abortions. The thing that struck me about her story is the fact that she was unable to form lasting relationships with any of her husbands, not really due to any serious fault of theirs, but seemingly because while in a relationship which had the potential to be a good, loving and lasting one, Assia always kept her eyes open, seeking someone or something else. Assia seems to have had no concept of true fidelity, not only of the body, but of the heart. It was disturbing to read about so much wasted time; the choices that caused so much hurt, both to herself and to others, and the waste of her potential.

However much pain Assia caused her husbands during the periods of time she spent with them, she was repaid in kind and in full by her relationship with Ted Hughes. The suicide of Sylvia Plath caused a huge wrent in their already fragile affair, although in one respect it bonded them, since Assia provided care to Ted's children immediately after the loss of Sylvia. But after the initial shock, neither one seemed prepared to let the other go, and years of a toxic and uneven relationship continued; Assia being particularly unwilling or unable to leave the truly unhealthy relationship. After Assia gave birth to their daughter (a choice she made, not supported by Hughes), they formed some stability in their relationship by living as a family in Ireland, but the needs of Hughes' infirm parents and their strong disapproval of his relationship with Assia was another nail in the coffin of their relationship. And their relationship really was, most unfortunately, a coffin. Also, by this time, Assia was getting older. Her ever-increasing insecurities about her looks; about aging, and her earning potential, combined with the maddening indecision over whether to put a period on their relationship that was Ted Hughes' biggest fault, left her convinced there was no other way out but suicide.

I felt a great deal of pity for Assia toward the end, and pity that she chose suicide, yet somehow, after reading the full story of her life, I understood why she did it and why she took her little daughter with her. Yes, that particular choice seems brutal and heartless, and yet, on the other hand, totally understandable, she didn't want to leave her Shura to a father who never really acknowledged her or supported her, or leave her to an aunt who lived a world away, who Shura had never met. (Yet on the other hand, Assia's sister might have been a stablizing influence for the little girl. It's impossible to know.) Shura was perhaps the one person who had all of Assia's love, without conditions, and in a twisted way, she had Shura's welfare in mind when she took her life.

Just a tragic, tragic story and a tragic life. The book is very well written and the claustrophobic downward spiral of Assia's life is explored fully and painfully by the authors. As you read her life story her eventual suicide becomes, at least to me, inevitable, despite Hughes' later assertion that it was avoidable. She had no inward resources, no core of strength and stability. She lacked confidence, having never learned to follow through on opportunities given to her throughout her life. She was a ship without a rudder or a compass, doomed to crash on the rocks. At least, that's how I felt after reading this biography.