Carl Rollyson at Lit Hub:
So far as I can determine Ted Hughes never went shopping with Sylvia Plath. He thought her flair for fashion, and her materialistic desires, frivolous. “I need to curb my lust for buying dresses,” she wrote to herself on May 9, 1958 while the married couple were living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Four years later, on her own in London during her last days, she shopped like mad, threw away her country duds, reveled in a new hairdo, and enjoyed wolf whistles on the street. She had repressed a good deal of herself to please the man whose unkempt, often dirty appearance she had schooled herself to tolerate.
Indexing Plath’s life helped me to more deeply appreciate why this troubling man won her over. In a May 7, 1957 letter to her brother, she mentioned writing a novel (never completed) tentatively titled, Hill of Leopards, which explored the “positive acceptance of conflict, uncertainty, & pain as the soil for true knowledge and life.” She saw in the hulking Hughes, a towering figure among his adoring Cambridge chaps, exactly the kind of challenge to “positive acceptance” that would fulfill herself as woman and artist, and that no other man—as far as I was able to quantify in my indexing—had come close to satisfying.
more here.