I eagerly anticipated the release of A Lover of Unreason by Israeli journalists Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, authors of the unique Holocaust narrative When We Were Giants. I’m shamelessly fascinated with books on the life of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, for reasons I can't always pinpoint. I often find myself reveling in tales of their brief time of happiness at Court Green, particularly Diane Wood Middlebrook’s sun-drenched and daffodil-starred descriptions of the property in her Plath-Hughes biography, Her Husband. 

I always imagine Court Green as a sort of writerly paradise, with a marrow-deep magic that infused the writing of both Hughes and Plath. I want to go back in time and be a guest there, helping Hughes prune the ancient rosebushes or whipping up recipes from The Joy of Cooking with Plath in her kitchen. Perhaps I also identify with the time of Plath’s life in which she was a struggling single mother, ill and surrounded by bad weather, lack of moral support, and small children, for I raised my own children alone in a rural house drenched by storms several months out of the year. As I read various biographies of Plath, I find myself asking certain questions: “What was right in the lives of this couple? What were their mistakes? Could it possibly have ended any differently?”

Still, as I read Lover of Unreason, I found myself asking another question: “Why am I reading this book, so full of tragedy and excruciatingly flawed people?” Lover of Unreason explores the cipher in the Plath-Hughes equation, the shadow in the noonday radiance of Court Green: Assia Wevill, Hughes’ mistress, in part responsible for the end of Plath and Hughes’ marriage.

Assia’s true role in Hughes’ life seems to have been hinted at for years in Plath biographies. I remember reading about her in Edward Butscher’s rather sensationalistic book about Plath, Method and Madness. Butscher gave Assia the pseudonym of “Olga” and described her as a “Russian beauty” who disguised her zaftig figure with long coats, so that I thought of her as dressing like a character straight out of Dr. Zhivago. In fact, Wevill’s weight and her striking looks seem to be a point of discussion in nearly every biography I have read which includes a description of her. I never hear about Hughes’ weight, or Plath’s, and it is hardly a point of interest to me about any of these people.

At any rate, Wevill has been mainly described as a temptress, a veritable serpent in the Garden of Eden that was the Plath-Hughes marriage. I had little idea of Assia’s background until I read the comprehensive study of her in Lover of Unreason. Wevill was the daughter of a Jewish father of Russian extraction and a Lutheran mother of German ancestry.

In 1933, when she was a young child, Assia, her sister Celia, and her parents fled Berlin during the Nazis' rise to power. They settled in Tel Aviv, where Assia bloomed into young womanhood. Assia seemed to become a restless soul, and traveled to England, straight into a disastrous first marriage — and, though married, Assia continued to need and attract as much male attention as she could, and she eventually divorced and remarried three times before she met up with Ted Hughes.