Sylvia Plath’s drawings

‘ ..how can
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of what the entire British and American
literary and critical establishment
has been at great lengths to deny
without ever saying it in so many words, of course,
the murder of Sylvia Plath…’ (Robin Morgan)

Not many people knew that Sylvia Plath was a talented artist. London’s Mayor Gallery showed her drawings for the first time. If Ted Hughes could paint or draw, the world would have known about it decades ago.

Sylvia was sent to a psychiatric hospital. She received electric shock treatment for months. It is so hard to believe a talented poet and artist like Sylvia Plath was mentally sick. She was different from others. She was more intelligent as well as sensitive than others. That was probably a good reason to accuse her of being crazy. Ted claimed Sylvia’s suicide was inevitable. But many people do not think it was inevitable. Ted’s behavior particularly his decision to leave her for other woman after six years of marriage, pushed her over the brink! Yes, it did.

Ted destroyed Sylvia’s last journals which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death in February 1963. Ted wrote, ‘I destroyed her journals because I did not want her children to read it.’ What did Sylvia write that Ted did not want her children to read? We all can guess Sylvia wrote about Ted and about Ted and about Ted, not about the Ted everybody knew as a wonderful poet but about the Ted Sylvia knew as an abusive husband. Writers and poets are against censorship, they believe in freedom of expression but Ted’s acts did not prove that he believed in freedom of expression. I so much wish to read Sylvia Plath’s journals that were destroyed by Ted Hughes, one of the twentieth century’s greatest English poets.

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Plath and Hughes, killed himself. Did he get his mother’s depression genes! You may say so. But I wonder, why Ted’s second wife Assia Wevill and their four year old daughter Shura Wevill committed suicide exactly the same way Sylvia committed suicide using a gas oven! Is it just coincidence or Ted killed them all?