The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill

The fame of Sylvia Plath and the notoriety of the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes has had the effect of making Assia Wevill seem like a third party, a bit player in the drama. She has too often been portrayed as a villain or a victim. Now at last we can see her as an author in her own right, an impassioned intelligence with a deep understanding of Jewish literary traditions and a real gift for the translation of poetry. ~Sir Jonathan Bate, author of "Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life"

Assia Wevill has often been cast as a femme fatale, maligned and blamed for Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Now, in this meticulously edited collection of letters, diary entries, poems, and translations, Assia emerges from the shadows, in her own words, as a complex and talented woman who achieved professional and artistic success despite a lifetime of displacement. In writings that are vulnerable, humorous, clear-eyed, and harrowing, we learn about her early life in Israel, her marriage to David Wevill, her relationship with Ted Hughes, her feelings about Sylvia Plath, her triumphant advertising campaigns, and her translation work with Yehuda Amichai. We learn, too, about her recurring struggles with depression and her reasons for suicide. This is a powerful, intimate, and compassionate portrait of a woman who has long been relegated to the margins of Plath and Hughes’s story. Thanks to the recovery efforts of Goodspeed-Chadwick and Steinberg, Assia Wevill finally has the chance to speak for herself. ~Heather Clark, author of "Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath"

With painstaking and inspired archival and biographical labor, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter K. Steinberg have assembled the first scholarly edition of the work of Assia Gutmann Wevill. This is a groundbreaking work. The editors’ great achievement is to have allowed Assia to speak for herself, for the first time to readers and scholars of twentieth century literature. Her voice is complex, multiple, bright, loving, philosophical, and tragic all at once. But it is above all her own voice. No reader or lover of modern literature can ignore this book. ~Luke Ferretter, author of "Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study"

Until now, Assia Wevill has been little more than a tragic footnote in other people’s stories. This superb new edition restores her voice as a woman fighting for agency and happiness against blind circumstance. We may already know how that struggle was destined to end, but the Collected Writings allows us for the first time to define her by her own vivid words. The work is a remarkable testament to what her editors call Wevill’s “individuality, variability, and vulnerability. ~Tim Kendall, author of "Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study and co-producer of Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar"

What a revelation it is to read this meticulous and necessary corrective to Assia’s legacy. Goodspeed-Chadwick and Steinberg should be congratulated. Assia is a figure that has long deserved our serious attention. Finally, Assia’s voice and views—written across genres from prose to poetry—are presented, allowing her to enter the historical record in an unadulterated way. ~David Semanki, co-contributor to "Ariel: The Restored Edition, a Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement"

Assia Wevill has long been demonized as “the other,” the beautiful and tragic woman responsible for the breakup of the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes marriage. In this impeccably edited volume, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter K. Steinberg give us an inside view of Wevill—through her letters, her journals, even her own poems and translations. (Of special interest is the diary she kept in the wake of Plath’s death.) Evident in this writing is a literary mind that might have flourished had the circumstances of her life allowed. Wevill’s perceptions are rich and compelling. ~David Trinidad, author of "Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems"

In her translation of Yehuda Amichai’s poem “I Was The Moon,” Assia Wevill wrote, “What am I?/ More than forgetting./ The very language of forgotten./ And until he understands what I did/ I am as good as dead.” She might well have been predicting her own posthumous life as a woman alternately hidden, misnamed, or wrongly stereotyped as a femme fatale. No one can bring Assia back from the dead, but this deeply intentional book helps us understand her in a way no previous work ever has. Wevill’s letters, journal entries, original poems and translations are not just the work of a single woman, but a ghostwalk through some of the 20th century’s most important political and cultural events, from the Second World War to the establishment of a Jewish state to Swinging London. When I think of Assia Wevill, the word that comes to mind is “understudy,” since for too long, she has been cast as either Sylvia Plath’s dark shadow or else the cause of her death. But this word takes on a double meaning here, since Assia has also historically been understudied, as the literary and biographical fields invested in Plath and Hughes refused to grant her the focus and care she so clearly needed and deserved. Goodspeed-Chadwick and Steinberg’s work clarify the importance of understanding Wevill as a literary and cultural figure worthy of study in her own right, and the ways our historical refusal to do this has left a dearth of understanding in Plath and Hughes studies. I am grateful for this book. It reminds me that no person is disposable; that stories long buried can come to light; and that the feminist principle of recovered histories is both a methodology and a moral stance. “Open up—again—” Assia once asked of Ted Hughes; may we, as readers, do just that for her, these many years later. ~Emily Van Duyne, author of "Loving Sylvia Plath"