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