Assia Wevill - Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes

In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat in Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London to Assia and David Wevill, and took up residence at North Tawton, Devon. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. He later wrote:

We didn't find her - she found us.

She sniffed us out.

She sat there

Slightly filthy with erotic mystery.

I saw the dreamer in her

Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

That moment the dreamer in me

Fell in love with her, and I soon knew it.

Plath noted their chemistry. Soon after, Ted and Assia began an affair. At the time of Plath's suicide, Wevill was pregnant with Hughes' child, but she had an abortion soon after. The actual relationship, who instigated it, and its circumstances have been hotly debated for many years.

Hughes moved her into Court Green (the North Tawton, Devon, home that he had bought with Plath), where Assia helped to care for Hughes' and Plath's two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Wevill was reportedly haunted by Plath's memory; she even began using things that had once belonged to Plath. In a biography of Assia, Lover of Unreason, the authors maintain that she used Plath's items not out of obsession, but rather for the sake of practicality, as she was maintaining a household for Hughes and his children. On 3 March 1965 at age 37, Wevill gave birth to Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed "Shura," while still married to David Wevill.

Ostracized by her lover's friends and family, and eclipsed by the figure of Plath in public life, she became anxious and suspicious of Hughes's infidelity, which was real enough. He began affairs with Brenda Hedden, a married acquaintance who frequented their home and Carol Orchard, a nurse twenty years his junior, whom he married in 1970. Wevill's relationship with Hughes was also fraught with complexities, as shown by a collection of his letters to her that have been acquired by Emory University. She was continually distraught at his seeming reluctance to commit to marrying and setting up a home with her while treating her as a "housekeeper". Most of Hughes' friends indicate that while he never publicly claimed Shura as his daughter, his sister Olwyn said that he did believe the child was his.