Little Fugue

Emotionally charged with an exceptional poetic gift, Sylvia Plath was a woman shadowed by a dark and very private pain that could only be released through death. Her suicide would harrow and haunt three people: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her demise and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plath’s rival and Hughes’s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer who reveals that Plath’s...
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Emotionally charged with an exceptional poetic gift, Sylvia Plath was a woman shadowed by a dark and very private pain that could only be released through death. Her suicide would harrow and haunt three people: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her demise and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plath’s rival and Hughes’s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer who reveals that Plath’s poems and her suicide “forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life.” Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades. Crackling with wit and verbal dexterity, Little Fugue is a stunning novel of artists caught between the erotic allure of extinction and the eternal power of poetry.