In recent years, as constraints have been lifted, the secrets surrounding the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—the most brilliant literary couple since the Brownings and the Woolfs—have gradually been revealed. Plath’s mother, Aurelia, died in 1994, Hughes in 1998. His sister, Olwyn, who resented Plath’s beauty and talent, and who was intensely jealous of her intimacy with Hughes, no longer controls Plath’s estate, enforcing her self-serving version of the truth and forcing biographers to submit to her diktat. Hughes’s Birthday Letters, his long-delayed response to Plath’s shocking attacks in the Ariel poems, came out in 1998. Erica Wagner has written Ariel’s Gift (2000), a valuable study of these poems. Plath’s complete Journals—with 400 new pages—appeared to great acclaim in 2000.

This literary equivalent of the opening of the seventh seal should have been a godsend to the first biographer (others are also at work) of Ted Hughes. Now, at last, the major questions may be answered: what caused the breakup of their marriage, why did Plath kill herself; who brought up their children, what were Hughes’s relations with them, what sort of lives did they have; why did he leave Plath for Assia Wevill, why did she also commit suicide (outdoing Plath by killing their child as well); what sort of marriage did he have with Carol Orchard, was she aware of his many love affairs, and, if so, how did she respond to them? But this brief, superficial and deeply disappointing biography by Elaine Feinstein, a poet and friend of Hughes, fails to answer—or even ask—most of these crucial queries.

After a childhood in the wilds of Yorkshire and a stint in the RAF, Hughes felt uneasy among the Cambridge literati. His sudden switch from English to anthropology was prompted by the dream he later described in “The Thought-Fox,” in which the animal placed its bloody paw on Hughes’s blank page and said: “Stop this—you are destroying us.” Feinstein fails to see the influence of D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Fox,” in which a symbolic animal imparts feral wisdom to a man, or to link it to the fox-cub episode in “Epiphany” in Birthday Letters. When, at the beginning of his marriage, Hughes told his brother that Sylvia “was his own ‘luck,’” he also echoed Lawrence’s compliment to Jessie Chambers, who had succeeded in placing his first poems with the English Review. Feinstein doesn’t connect what Plath called his sulky “white-hot silences” with her jealous rage when she saw him walking with an attractive student: “his smile became … too white-hot, became fatuous, admiration-seeking.”

Feinstein is very weak on Hughes’s poems; one would never know, from her discussion, that he was a major author. She devotes only one page to his brilliant first book, Hawk in the Rain, and offers banalities like “the wish to continue living was in accord with the whole universe.” She loyally defends his Poet Laureate poems, but she doesn’t see how ludicrously inappropriate (even humiliating) it was for the poet who had described animals tearing at the entrails of their prey to celebrate the ill-fated royal wedding of Fergie and Prince Andrew in “The Honey Bee and the Thistle” (1986). Though she admits that his eccentric book on Shakespeare was roundly condemned, she asserts (in another meaningless generalization) that his prose “is among the finest of the twentieth century.” She’s similarly inadequate when dealing with Plath’s poems. She misses the influence of Frost’s “Design” on “Widow,” The Waste Land and the Biblical resurrection of Lazarus on “Mirror,” and the personal significance of the funereal yews (a homonym for “Hughes”) in the cemetery adjacent to their garden in Devon: “And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.”

Hughes’s study of anthropology led to a lifelong passion for mysticism, spiritualism and the occult: for a trashy hodge-podge of astrology and alchemy, black magic and witchcraft, Rosicrucianism and Jungianism, Ouija boards, tarot cards, and séances. Feinstein doesn’t say whether Hughes actually believed all this stuff, but he certainly used it to explain Plath’s irrational behavior and to exculpate himself. When she was strung “tight as a wire,” he blamed not his own white-hot silences, but the relation of the Moon and Saturn. In Birthday Letters he argued that her suicide was not triggered by his adultery, but predestined.

Plath’s Germanic parents engendered in her a Teutonic rigor and seriousness, a relentless egoism and intellectual competitiveness, a character that was selfish, difficult and pathological. (Her literary persona, though caustically funny, is strangely repellent.) Cambridge friends spoke of her ebullient but rather false “Doris Day mask,” Hughes mentioned her “death-ray quality,” and even Plath exclaimed: “how could anyone else stand me!” He always helped with the children and the household chores, but when he was writing she would interrupt him more than a hundred times in one morning.

When jealous, as she often was, she destroyed his possessions: first his cufflinks and his book on witches, then his precious volume of Shakespeare and all his work in progress. Finally, she made a bonfire of all the papers in his study. Plath, playing on his name, had always described him as “huge,” but when he betrayed her, she felt he had “become a little man.” His commitment to their marriage was limited, hers was absolute (she never slept with anyone else after he left her), and she was destroyed by his infidelity. As she told a friend, with awful finality: “When you give your heart to somebody, you can’t take it back. If they don’t want it, it’s gone.” Hughes’s betrayal hurt her into poetry. But he later admitted, when overcome by guilt: “It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius.”

Plath—whose father died deliberately, as she saw it, by ignoring his curable disease—feared abandonment and could not bear rejection. Her poems ruthlessly exposed her own terrors; Hughes knew, better than anyone else, that she was mentally unstable and suicidal. But her desperate hope for reconciliation with Hughes, love for her two small children (put at great risk by the gas that killed her), and even the joyous fulfillment of her poetry could not sustain her. The perilous balance between the controlled mania that fueled the creativity of her final months and the mad frenzy that propelled her to suicide was finally destroyed. She may have thought her poems had stopped forever, or that the strain of creating them had become intolerable, or that if they didn’t continue she couldn’t bear to live, or that she was heading for another—permanent—mental crash, for which the poems were a warning and a reward. By killing herself she turned her best material over to Hughes: her infants, her torment, and her poems. Like the relics of a medieval saint, Plath’s letters and diaries have been sold, stolen, hidden, dispersed, and destroyed.

The predatory and seductive Assia Wevill, the femme fatale of this tragedy, was much more beautiful and glamorous than Sylvia. She had cheated death by narrowly escaping the Nazi extermination camps, and she seemed to be living on borrowed time. Assia was haunted by her rival, even believed she saw her ghost. Hughes blamed her for Plath’s death by exclaiming: “You are the dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia.” Just as Hughes had bitterly regretted his failure to see Plath’s great danger at the end of her life, so he also failed to help Assia at her crucial moment. When she spoke to him on the telephone on the afternoon of her suicide (also by gas), “he failed to give her the reassurance she needed.”

Feinstein refuses to delve deeply into the issues she chooses to discuss. How did Hughes (like the young Hemingway) acquire the reputation of a writer before he’d published anything? Who was Rosemary Joseph, “already part of his life” in Cambridge? What did he think of Plath’s brother, Warren, when they first met? How, precisely, did American literature inspire Hughes’s poetry? The extremism of Lowell’s confessional outbursts certainly tore Hughes away from the polite formulations of the English Movement poets, but his poetry seems closer to John Clare’s ferocious “Badger” and to Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers than to anything by Ransom or Wilbur. How did Hughes, following the risky tradition of Pound and Auden, translate poems from languages he didn’t know? What was the nature of his close friendship with Seamus Heaney? How was Hughes’s interest in the occult dangerous to Plath’s delicate psychic makeup? Why did he never touch his infant son, Nicholas, and what effect did this have on the child? What was so disturbing, shortly before Plath’s suicide, about the animal odor of her hair? Normally squeaky clean, she was now deeply depressed. She frightened off Al Alvarez as well as Doris Lessing, who also “drew back from the desperation she sensed underneath Sylvia’s animation.” Was Plath’s suicide, as Anne Sexton caustically suggested, “her greatest career move?”

Feinstein doesn’t even begin to explore the effect on her marriage of Sylvia’s relations with Aurelia. Her “Electra on the Azalea Path,” about the horrific visit to her father’s grave, is also a severe judgment on Aurelia Plath. Aurelia, from whom Sylvia was trying to escape by living in England, accompanied the couple on part of their honeymoon, witnessed in Devon the dissolution of their marriage, and urged Sylvia to get a divorce when it was the last thing she really wanted. Only after Sylvia had destroyed the part of her mother in herself, rejected Aurelia’s oppressive concepts of work, love, marriage, home, and family, and stanched the hemorrhage of gratitude, could she finally express her hatred of her parents, as well as of her husband, in the Ariel poems.

Since Plath died without a will, Hughes took control of her estate and brought out most of her works posthumously. His triple authority as husband, poet, and critic—expressed in at least fourteen essays, introductions, notes, and letters about Plath— profoundly influenced our understanding of her life and art. Plath had destroyed his manuscripts when they were separated; he said he destroyed hers after her death. In his introduction to the expurgated editions of her Journals, Hughes disingenuously wrote: “I destroyed [one notebook] because I did not want her children to have to read it.” The earlier one, which she kept while writing Ariel, “disappeared more recently and may, presumably, still turn up.”

Feinstein does not question these dubious statements, though Plath’s children, of course, did not “have to read it.” Surely if Hughes had been so concerned about his children’s welfare, he would have taken better care of Plath instead of running off with Assia. But he may well have kept the precious journals, instead of destroying them, and lied about the lost notebook to throw scholars off the scent. They may still exist—kept hidden by his widow or his children—and their appearance would radically change our view of Plath’s relations with Hughes and her intensely creative final months.