Lynne Feeley at The Nation:
In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to get “everything right” because “everyone is going to come for it.” Van Duyne took this to mean that the book had to be “textual,” not merely “rhetorical.” Getting “everything right” meant being sure to base her claims in verifiable, textual evidence and the documented historical record. There was good reason for the friend’s warning, its roots deep in the unsavory and litigious history of biographical publishing on Plath. Janet Malcolm depicted it as a field ruled by Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, who for decades was Plath’s literary executor, but who considered her a “nasty selfish bitch” (as Plath put it in a 1961 letter) and who granted access to the poet’s archive and permission to quote from her work only on condition of the biographer’s willingness to tell the story that the Hughes family wanted told.
more here.
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