
Ariel's Gift
Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters
Erica Wagner(Author)
WW Norton & Co (Publisher)
Published on 16. May 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
322 pages
978-0-393-32301-6 (ISBN)
Description
When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim, immediately landing on the bestseller list. Few suspected that Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on this cycle of poems addressed to his first wife, Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between these two poets through their lives and their writings. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters, showing the events that shaped them and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work. "Both narratively engaging and scholastically comprehensive."-Thomas Lynch, Los Angeles Times "Wagner has set the poems of Hughes's Birthday Letters in the context of his marriage to Plath with great delicacy."-Times Literary Supplement
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
8 pages of b/w photographs
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 133 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
407 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-393-32301-6 (9780393323016)
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
11/2015
W. W. Norton & Company
€21.99
Available for download
Person
Erica Wagner is the author of Gravity, a book of stories, and Ariel's Gift. She was born in New York and lives in London, where she is literary editor of The Times.