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On February 11, 1963, in the depths of the worst winter since the war, Sylvia Plath laid plates of bread and milk outside the room where her two children were sleeping, put her head in the oven and turned on the gas. A few months before, she had broken up with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes.
One of those children was two-year-old Frieda. She has spent most of the 34 years since attempting to unload the heavy burden imposed by that day. But now that she has established herself as a successful artist, she feels it's time to face up to her background.
`It may seem difficult to believe, but I never read my parents' poetry until a couple of years ago,' Frieda tells me in the deserted south London restaurant where we meet. `I even rejected the chance to study my father's work for school exams. It was too close to home. What if an examiner had said, `You're wrong about this poem. It means such and such,' and I had replied, `Actually, it doesn't. I've discussed it with my father and he wrote it'?' Ignoring your parents' achievement might be either an act of rebellion, or a sensible precaution against their influence. Which was it for Frieda? `Both. I went through the usual adolescent phase of revolt, and tended to do things because I knew it would annoy my father - like getting married to an unsuitable man when I was ridiculously young. But I also knew I had to find my own voice and vision as an artist.' Frieda has published seven books of children's fiction, built an international career as a painter, and is soon to publish her first book of poetry, a move that will inevitably invite comparison with her parents. But to get that far, she had to do more than claim her own space. She found it necessary to block out the tragic facts of her parents' marriage and her mother's suicide. Those facts, and the actions and emotions of those involved, have become the subject of heated controversy among biographers, critics, academics and journalists, as well as the surviving family and friends of both Plath and Hughes.
This war over Plath's corpse has been waged by...