Ted Hughes's archetypal marriage with Sylvia Plath: Birthday Letters, Her Husband, and Jungian alchemical individuation.

Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, October, 2006 by Shinn, Beverly; Sugg, Richard P.

Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath--A Marriage (2003) is a thoroughly researched critical biography of the couple; it builds on the extensive work of previous commentators, and incorporates archival materials newly made available after Ted Hughes's death in 1998. The former Stanford professor, perhaps best known for her biography of Anne Sexton (the book's "Bibliography" identifies her previous Plath/Hughes criticism only as the 1993 "Channeling Plath" in "Mirabella" and a 1999 "Introduction" to an edition of The Bell Jar), presents a psychologically oriented interpretation of the Ted Hughes--Sylvia Plath marriage, one showing the husband in a different, more favorable light, while avoiding any denigration of the wife. As Middlebrook proclaims...

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