Monstrous myths that have hijacked Sylvia Plath's life

The latest book on the poet casts her in a world of repressed domestic violence at the hands of husband Ted Hughes. It's a familiar tale that does her a disservice

- Robert McCrum

It was Boris Pasternak, author of Dr Zhivago, who sounded a sombre warning about what happens in the terrible event of someone taking their own life: “We have no conception of the inner torture which precedes suicide.”

And in this latest book on Sylvia Plath, we have an original tale full of attitude whose origins must be traced to one of the most notorious suicides of all. More challenging and complex still, on top of a classic enigma, we have a new take on an old story of a tragic love affair that continues to torment writers and readers in equal measure, from the bright revolutionary skies of east coast America to the back-ways of Hampstead Heath or Primrose Hill.

What began as a bitter marital breakdown has, over time, become a monster of myth and counter-myth that haunts every new generation.

It is a story that first took root in Camden Town, that leafy, yet grey, part of London known to Dickens. In the autumn of 1962, an expat American poet and novelist and mother of two, recently separated from her partner, a celebrated English poet, moved into the second-floor flat of a house previously occupied by WB Yeats.

A place whose associations seemed pre-ordained, it was here that the 30-year-old began to write as she’d never done before, in a fever of self-awakening. We now know that both she and her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, were in the antechamber of greatness. He had found his voice, and been acclaimed for it, with The Hawk in the Rain. She, having taken the rooms in Fitzroy Road, was “living like a Spartan”, to complete the Ariel poems that would also make her famous, composing new work in the cold blue dawn, gripped by the belief that she must write “to free myself from the past”.