![]() ![]() ![]() Koren and Negev have risen admirably to the gauntlet thrown down by the fictional Ellen on behalf of her real-life counterpart: Assia Wevill, damned as a succuba, a home-wrecker, Ted Hughes’s “Lilith of abortions”. “Write me, write me, not them.” Somehow the mystery and allure of this fatal triangle has ensured that a woman whose life would not normally be considered biographical material remains of interest to readers. But the unnamed narrator is haunted by a voice that whispers: “Write me, write me, not them.” The words are uttered by Ellen, a thin disguise of the real woman (and Weldon’s friend) Assia Gutmann Wevill, whose affair with Ted Hughes was the catalyst – angrier critics would say the direct cause – of the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. In Fay Weldon’s short story “In the Great War (II)”, the protagonist, Ellen, kills herself and her daughter after being blamed by her lover for his wife’s suicide. Note: originally published in the Dublin Review of Books, Autumn 2007Ī Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Robson Books, 320 pp, ISBN: 978-186105974 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |