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When one spends time in the archives . . . it becomes increasingly apparent how Assia Aurelia has been elided from the professional and public record in many ways. Her own voice has been silenced: in life, in the archive, and in the public domain. Texts authored by her, specifically her journals and letters, remain unpublished and are difficult to access. Others speak for her and about her, most notably Hughes and Plath, and they tax Assia Aurelia with their own grievances. Part of what I hope to accomplish with this study is the acknowledgement that what we have done to Assia Aurelia in professional scholarship, in texts that circulate on the internet, and in our classrooms is antifeminist and a profound and unkind injury to another woman who deserves better than what she encountered in her life. . . [1]
Vastly different women, in the Plath story billeted light-years apart, Aurelia and Assia had in common only that they were females long associated with Ted Hughes. They bonded over that experience. They exchanged letters and met in England in 1967. In 1968 Assia wrote Aurelia that "Ted was brutal to her": "I thought suddenly that that degree of brutality would slowly dement me." [2] Sylvia in her final months wrote her mother that Ted maltreated her and wished her dead. Aurelia photocopied Sylvia's letters and kept them in her bank's safe-deposit box, and preserved Assia's letters in cold storage in the next town over. [3] Aurelia was building a case. On behalf of two dead women.
Why have you heard next to none of this?
It wasn't easy for -- oh, somebody -- to purge from the Plath narrative those most intimately involved and discredit their testimony. Ted ordered both women not to speak of him. When Aurelia and Assia were at last publicly named -- Ted withheld Assia's name for years -- critics and biographers using Sylvia's furious cues called them witches and vampires who ruined Sylvia's life: disposable, talentless minor characters somehow potent enough to be the death of her. Let's demythify: Aurelia and Assia knew too well who was the death of her. [4]
To Sylvia and Ted, Aurelia Plath and Assia Wevill weren't minor or marginal at all.
Goodspeed-Chadwick points out that scholarship about Assia takes place amid 50 years' worth of smoke and mirrors and the evidence is fragmented, obscure, or forbidden to use. The same with Aurelia. I see now that even feminist writers label the slinky vixen and the schoolmarm prude using identical terms: Desperate. Talentless. Clingy. Wannabes. Schemers. Vacuous. Trivial. Destroyers, devourers. Bad mothers. Sexually suspect. Empty. Unworthy. Monstrous. An essay somewhere says Assia is Medusa . . . Aurelia's and Assia's many faults are so weirdly alike either because they're both Taurus or because our thinking is corrupt.
Better then not to mention them. Aurelia is such box-office poison, her name such a trigger, that the Plath family materials being processed at Yale get called "Warren Plath's estate."
Until reading Goodspeed-Chadwick I didn't consider Aurelia's link with Assia. But there was a link. They met. Maybe there's a photo. I want to know more.
[1] Goodspeed-Chadwick, J. Reclaiming Assia Wevill, Louisiana State University Press, 2019, Chapter 1.
[2] Grogan, K. "Tight Wires," Los Angeles Times Book Review, 16 March 2023.
[3] Aurelia Plath in longhand annotated Sylvia Plath's letter of 1 January 1961 re "letters in Wellesley safe-deposit box and Assia's in cold storage in Waltham." Plath mss. II, Lilly Library.
[4] Emily Van Duyn's Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (2024) argues that Ted Hughes abused Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill and undercut their testimonies by obscuring and editing the evidence. I reviewed the book here.
