A Pro-Plath Polemic: Emily Van Duyne on Her New Book Loving Sylvia Plath.

Can an academic write objectively about a complicated historical figure they profess to love?

Can an academic write objectively about a complicated historical figure they profess to love? Do they even want to?

Those were the questions I had in the back of my mind while reading Emily Van Duyne’s new book,

Loving Sylvia Plath

, which she describes as “a pro-Plath polemic” after 50 years of largely anti-Plath polemics. There’s lots to critique about the American poet and novelist of The Bell Jar, to be sure, and Van Duyne does so with aplomb. What she also does with aplomb is examine Plath’s writing about intimate partner violence at the hands of her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes, and how that shows up in Plath’s work. Loving Sylvia Plath is one of if not the first biography—or reclamation, as the subtitle contends—of Plath that grapples with the “open secret” of Hughes’ abuse and how he “wrote the script” about Plath and the other women artists he abused. 

“A lot of times when you’re reading about Plath, it’s not Sylvia Plath, it’s Ted Hughes in drag,” Van Duyne says of much of the literature about Plath that’s out there.

I spoke to Van Duyne about her “parasocial relationship” with Plath and how that bond helped save her from intimate partner violence. So no, Van Duyne never wanted to be objective about Plath. “My love for Plath and devotion to knowing more about her and getting to the truth of her life and her work is one of the things that saved me,” she says. “It gave my career and my life a focus in the aftermath of that violence that allowed me to rebuild it.”