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Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s study of Assia Wevill (née Gutmann) is a significant work for those who study 20th century American and British literature, particularly those who research Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes. It is the first book of its kind to focus on the representations of Wevill in Plath’s and Hughes’s poetry as well as, and more importantly, Wevill’s own creative work and representations of herself. Coming 40 years after her death, this study is long overdue.
Wevill’s role in a fatal love triangle with Plath and Hughes is what she is most known for. Her relationship with Hughes lasted for over seven years, and they were the parents of one daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Elise Wevill (Shura). The definite end to their relationship was her death to suicide and Shura’s death to filicide in 1969. To establish Wevill as more than a figure in other people’s tragedies, Goodspeed-Chadwick works to give her a multi-dimensional perspective. Goodspeed-Chadwick’s stated goal is “to offer new scholarship on the writer and artist Assia Wevill in order to establish her significance in letters and to accord her a more proper place than femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicides” (4). To this end, Goodspeed-Chadwick mostly succeeds. The success is only partial because the lack of scholarship on Wevill requires that before presenting different points of view Goodspeed-Chadwick must spend time explaining how Wevill has been traditionally seen.
To do so, the chapter dedicated on Plath analyzes five of her poems written in 1962 and 1963. This chapter covers familiar territory in its analysis of “Words Heard by Accident, over the Phone,” “Burning the Letters,” “The Fearful,” “Childless Woman,” and “The Munich Mannequins.” In these poems, Plath presents Wevill as an exotic temptress who invades the domestic space. She is the voice heard on the telephone that precipitated Hughes’s leaving. She is childless and beautiful. She is Plath’s tragic muse. Goodspeed-Chadwick...