Features | April 16, 2024

Love and Work: Three Biographies of Artistic Power Couples

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath–A Marriage, by Diane Middlebrook. Viking, 2003, 361 pp., $25.95 (hardcover)

Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century, by Stephen Galloway. Grand Central Publishing, 2022, 206 pp., $30.00 (hardcover)

Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, by Mark Braude. Norton, 2022, 290 pp., $30.00 (hardcover)

During the summer of 2007, I spent a week at the British Library combing through the archives of writers. One of my fondest discoveries occurred while paging through the folders of Ted Hughes, which offered glimpses of what is was like to be a writer in England during the postwar years. The country was still suffering the deprivations of the Second World War, and the basic necessities were scarce and expensive. Hughes habitually used scraps of household paper for his writing–receipts, grocery bags, airmail envelopes, bits of wrapping paper. Even more surprising, poems and prose by Sylvia Plath, his wife and fellow writer, can be found on the flip side of some of his work. The opening page of Plath’s lost last novel, Falcon Yard (which was to be a sequel to The Bell Jar), appears on the back of one of Hughes’s animal poems. The paper I handled was often so thin, if I held it to the light of my desk, words by the two writers fused together into an indecipherable amalgam of text. These remnants are evidence of a close creative relationship, and they symbolized to me the uniqu forms of collaboration that can sometimes develop between artists.