A Post-Atlantic Divorce

Abstract

Amplified by their supporters and detractors, the voices of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath are still reverberating long after their deaths. The readings and writings that they inspire form part of an Atlantic afterlife that surfaces in the Digital Age. Plath’s death left a void that has been filled with a large body of critical responses much of which overlaps with the emotional investments of devoted readers who continue to discover her prodigious talent as a poet and also identify with the pain she suffered. Fueled by cultural rivalry across the Atlantic, devotion to Plath has also generated equal measures of hostility toward Ted Hughes who is still held accountable by some for Plath’s suicide in 1963. As her widower, he also became the chief editor of her estate and, therefore, responsible for the posthumous publications of her poems, letters, and journals. The story of Hughes and Plath was already a highly charged text further refracted and readable through a lens of great social upheaval and the development of personal autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s. The aftermath of Plath’s suicide until the publication of Birthday Letters by Hughes shortly before his death in 1998 also provides an opportunity to trace the development of the Information Age in the latter half of last century.