
Lives Revised
Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick(Author)
Louisiana State University Press
Published on 12. September 2025
Book
Hardback
192 pages
978-0-8071-8478-3 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 2025 Lewis P. Simpson Award
In Lives Revised, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick engages the entangled life stories of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath to recover details, nuances, and perspectives excluded from previous biographies. Based on extensive archival work at the British Library and Emory University, as well as unpublished materials in private hands, Goodspeed-Chadwick considers how biographical storylines are constructed, reconceived, and dismantled across decades of research and interpretation. Her work plumbs the practical challenges and interpretive possibilities of biographies that engage with difficult subjects such as Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, particularly given the personal traumas, tragic ends, and competing legacies involved.
Drawing on documents and recordings only recently made available to researchers, Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath recovers previously inaccessible accounts about its subjects, contextualizes them within the critical traditions of feminism and trauma studies, and asks readers and scholars to rethink previous conclusions about three complex figures in literary and cultural history.
In Lives Revised, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick engages the entangled life stories of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath to recover details, nuances, and perspectives excluded from previous biographies. Based on extensive archival work at the British Library and Emory University, as well as unpublished materials in private hands, Goodspeed-Chadwick considers how biographical storylines are constructed, reconceived, and dismantled across decades of research and interpretation. Her work plumbs the practical challenges and interpretive possibilities of biographies that engage with difficult subjects such as Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, particularly given the personal traumas, tragic ends, and competing legacies involved.
Drawing on documents and recordings only recently made available to researchers, Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath recovers previously inaccessible accounts about its subjects, contextualizes them within the critical traditions of feminism and trauma studies, and asks readers and scholars to rethink previous conclusions about three complex figures in literary and cultural history.
Reviews / Votes
"Assia Wevill, the shadowy third woman in the tragic triangle of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, comes blazingly alive in this groundbreaking and compassionate study by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick. An essential addition to the field." - Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx"Drawing upon new sources, Goodspeed-Chadwick enriches our understanding of Assia and Ted's story, and blows open the misogynistic and sexist tropes that have calcified around the Assia-Ted-Sylvia triangle. Goodspeed-Chadwick rewrites Assia back into literary history, and reveals the biases that prevented her life from receiving the respect and attention it deserves. This book not only restores Assia Wevill's humanity but also offers new paradigms for feminist biography." - Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Baton Rouge
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
385 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8071-8478-3 (9780807184783)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
09/2025
Zando - Crooked Media Reads
€19.49
Available for download
Person
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick is Chancellor's Professor of English, affiliate faculty member in women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and director of the Office of Student Research at Indiana University Columbus. She is the author of Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination and coeditor, with Peter K. Steinberg, of The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill.