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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... Read Full Overview

Through their lives and their writings, Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters, showing the events that shaped them and showing how they draw upon Plath's own work.