Article content

Feminists who exploited the death of Sylvia Plath to accuse her husband Ted Hughes of mistreating her committed an “abuse” and a “horrible form of theft,” the couple’s daughter has said.

Frieda Hughes, the eldest of Plath and Hughes’s two children, said she had been “appalled” by the appropriation of her family’s tragedy to suit a cause.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Feminist 'outsiders' abused and exploited poet Sylvia Plath’s suicide, daughter says in first TV interview Back to video

Appearing in her first television interview, Hughes, a poet herself, said she deplored the judgment of “outsiders” who mistakenly believed they had an insight into her family’s life.

Hughes was two years old when her mother committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, while in the grip of depression.

The episode was described by Hughes in a poem as “head in oven, orphaning children.”

Her father, who later became poet laureate, went on to have a relationship with his mistress Assia Wevill, who killed herself and their child in the same way six years later.

The incidents, which left Ted Hughes unable to write his Crow collection, were taken up by furious feminists, who idolized Plath and accused her husband of mistreating both women.