Sylvia and Ted [Hardcover]

Emma Tennant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 2001 | Series: John MacRae Books

A fictional re-creation of the turbulent courtship, marriage, and separation of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

In intense, dramatic prose, Emma Tennant unfolds a story of passion, conflict, and betrayal. Creating a series of unforgettable images she reconstructs the twentieth century's most famous literary love affair and the tempestuous triangle between Hughes, Plath, and Assia Wevill. Filled with mounting suspense and lurking danger, Sylvia and Ted is a tale that culminates in tragedy, leaving in its wake a hundred unanswered questions.

Tennant was drawn to the subject partly as a result of her past relationship with Hughes -- and because of the legs that surround him and the two women who loved him. Though imaginative fiction, her novel vividly evokes the social and literary circles in which Plath and Hughes traveled and with the complexities, needs, and desires of three talented yet tortured people whose story continues to capture the imagination of readers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the almost four decades since her suicide, Sylvia Plath has been idolized almost as much for her role as the deceived wife of Ted Hughes as for her poetic works. The couple's erotically charged meeting, initially idyllic marriage and later bitter estrangement are documented in Plath's journals and letters and in numerous nonfiction books. Before his death last year, Hughes published Birthday Poems, manifestly his version of their relationship. That there was a third party to their tragedy, Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, who herself committed suicide, has also been a matter of public record. Now British author Tennant, who memorialized her own relationship with Hughes in her memoir, Burnt Diaries (U.K., Canongate, 1999), imagines Sylvia's, Ted's and Assia's lives as told from each participant's point of view. As befits a story of a tragic love triangle among poets, Tennant writes lyrical and surcharged prose, with short chapters shot through with intense emotion. Though the narrative is initially overwrought and heavily portentous, she sustains the dramatically dark mood artfully, building to a fittingly mythic, cathartic ending. Her psychological insights into Plath's and Wevill's troubled personalities, which at first may seem gratuitously grim, shed light on their early experiences and emotional conditioning, and become more appropriate as Plath, Hughes and Wevill mature. Accelerating the dramatic suspense, Tennant alternates the feverish thoughts of three high-strung, complex personalities, and although the outcome is known, readers will feel the strong hand of fate in the collision of their passions and artistic ambitions. (May 12)Forecast: A must-read for Plath devotees, the novel also has enough appeal as well-crafted fiction to attract a discriminating audience of more general readers. It joins other recent (nonfiction) titles that have kindled fresh interest in the couple. Plath's unabridged diaries were published last year, and Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters is being released this month (Forecasts, Mar. 19).

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath continue to evoke debate and commentary. Novelist Tennant, who recounted her own affair with Hughes in Burnt Diaries, offers a brittle, fictionalized account of the lives of Hughes, Plath, and Assia Wevill, the other woman in Ted's life. (Ironically, Wevill also later killed herself.) Full of portents and omens, the story is a series of oblique passages and lyrical descriptions, all issued in a clipped cadence with edges as jagged as the lives examined. Tennant is unsparing and the story relentless in its decline into despair and death. For literary collections and public libraries where there is demand.
- Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 177 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (May 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805066756
• ISBN-13: 978-0805066753
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,062,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Anvilicious!, November 10, 2001

By 

Lena Friesen "Stereogirl" (London, England, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sylvia and Ted (Hardcover)

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes' mistresses in the 1970s; she published Burnt Diaries, her memoirs about Hughes, not long after his death. Now she has published a 'fictionalized' account of Sylvia, Ted and Assia.

I have been reading and studying about Plath for many years, and thus know quite a bit about her, and find the fictional portrait of her to be off, overripe. I don't know how much 'fiction' there is in the book, for instance are all statements made in quotation marks for real? Because this novel relies *heavily* on the actual events in Plath's and then the Hugheses' lives, any fiction will either be garishly out of place (the whole Kate Hands episode) or will be vulgar, such as the idea that Plath found out that Assia was pregnant and that *this* is what drove her to suicide...

Plath (who is the main subject of the book; Assia is much less thought-out and is dispensed with in a perfunctory way) is done a disservice here; in Burnt Diaries she asks Hughes what she was like, and he won't say a word. Maybe it was because of books like this.

I am giving it one star for the the cover, for its merciful brevity and because it reminded me to get some red lipstick.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Most Decidedly, a Mixed Bag, March 4, 2005

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sylvia and Ted (Hardcover)

SYLVIA AND TED, a strangely designed blue-gray book with a flower whose petals are grasped by fish hooks on the cover, a short novel by one Emma Tennant, sat with multiple copies on the table of "drastically reduced books for sale" at a local bookstore. Interest in the poetry of Ted Hughes and also that of the last works of Sylvia Plath made me curious enough to buy it without much thought. And it sat on my desk for months until one rainy evening it served to usurp my time for about three hours of reading. It is a strange book.

Emma Tennant (despite her apparent connections with Ted Hughes) is a curious writer. In SYLVIA AND TED she seems more intent on creating an atmosphere for the odd love story between two poets than in committing a biography to paper. In doing so she succeeds on some levels. The book is divided into years of importance in the lives of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill - and in this manner she seems to be in awe of Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS, so intense is her exploration into the dark moods of each of these moments in time. And had she remained focused in this style then this book would have had a better chance at succeeding.

Tennant's problem is her self-indulgent verbiage, waxing literary in mythology and in symbolism that is more of a distraction than a significant modifier to the tale of two suicides over a single poet. To her credit she does manage a style of reportage that constantly keeps her in a position of close observer to the creative mind of Sylvia Plath. There is enough information about the disintegration of Plath's mind to make her suicide seem credible, no mean feat for a writer. But why include Assia Wevill from the very first of the book, weaving her in and out of the story at will as though setting Assia up a trope for all of Ted Hughes' well-documented assignations?

Quibbling? Perhaps. This is not the book to read for a biography of these well known subjects: this is a theme and variations on the lives of artists heavily weighted with poetically inclined diversions. It has its moments. Grady Harp, March 2005

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Plathitudinous, January 9, 2006

By 

Bonzo (Redfern, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sylvia and Ted (Hardcover)

Unconvincing novel about Sylvia and Ted.She was a suicidal neurotic,he was a male chauvinist.End of story. To re-phrase Oscar Wilde,'To lose one wife by suicide may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.'