Sylvia Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, began an affair with Assia Wevill not long before Plath took her own life — and then Wevill died in an eerily similar manner years later.
IU Columbus/YouTubeAssia Wevill, the affair partner of Ted Hughes who died by suicide at age 41.
When Sylvia Plath died by suicide in 1963, many of her fans blamed her husband, Ted Hughes. They had separated a year prior, largely due to his affair with a woman named Assia Wevill.
Wevill was a copywriter and poetry translator who had rented an apartment from Hughes when she and her husband, David, moved to London’s Primrose Hill neighborhood in 1961. Despite the fact that they were both married, Hughes and Wevill quickly fell in love.
Following Plath’s death, Wevill moved in with Hughes almost immediately. By 1965, they’d welcomed a daughter, Shura. However, the memory of Plath loomed over their relationship. Wevill once called her “my predecessor between our heads at night.”
On March 23, 1969, Assia Wevill took her own life the exact same way Plath had six years earlier — and she killed Shura, too. This is her tragic yet controversial story.
The Early Life And Marriages Of Assia Wevill
Assia Wevill’s life was tumultuous long before she met Ted Hughes. Born in Berlin to a Jewish father in 1927, she fled Germany with her family as a child to avoid persecution from the Nazis. They moved to Tel Aviv, where Assia remained until she married British soldier John Steele in 1947 and returned to London with him.
The marriage was reportedly loveless, with Assia viewing it as a practical way to immigrate to England. They divorced two years later after moving to Canada, but Assia remarried in 1952, this time to an economist named Richard Lipsey. In an essay he wrote later in life, Lipsey briefly described his relationship with Assia, stating simply: “I will not say more about my first marriage except to note that the word ‘tumultuous’ is not an over dramatization.”
Find a GraveAssia Wevill made a name for herself as a copywriter, creating a particularly successful advertisement for women’s hair dye in 1965.
In 1956, Lipsey and Assia boarded a ship to London. During the journey, Assia met a young Canadian poet named David Wevill, who was eight years her junior. They began an affair, and they wed in 1960 after Assia divorced Lipsey.
Then, in 1961, David and Assia Wevill rented a London apartment from British poet Ted Hughes and his wife, renowned writer Sylvia Plath. The two couples became friends — but Hughes and Wevill soon began an illicit relationship of their own.
The Affair That Ended Ted Hughes’ Marriage To Sylvia Plath
In May 1962, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath invited David and Assia Wevill to their new home in Devon. It’s unknown if Hughes and Wevill had already begun their affair at this point, but it was certainly in full swing after the visit. According to an excerpt from Wevill’s biography, A Lover of Unreason, that was printed in The Telegraph in 2006, Hughes went to Wevill’s workplace a month later and left her a note that read, “I have come to see you, despite all marriages.”
By that October, Plath had discovered Hughes’ infidelity and asked him to move out. Her mental health deteriorated rapidly following their separation, and she took her life by sticking her head into a gas oven on Feb. 11, 1963.
Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock PhotoSylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on their honeymoon in 1956.
Within weeks, Assia Wevill had moved in with Ted Hughes, presumably to help him care for his and Plath’s two young children. She seemingly felt no remorse for her role in the dissolution of Hughes’ and Plath’s marriage. In fact, in the aftermath of Plath’s suicide, she purportedly complained, “It was very bad luck that the love affair was besmirched by this unfortunate event.”
Wevill was also pregnant with what was presumably Hughes’ child at the time, though she sought an abortion — only to welcome a daughter named Shura with Hughes two years later. And all the while, she remained married to David Wevill, though she lived with Hughes off and on.
This bizarre arrangement continued for several years, though Wevill often felt the weight of Plath’s death while she was with Hughes. According to A Lover of Unreason, Assia Wevill once wrote in her diary: “I’m immersed now in the Hughes’s monumentality, hers and his. The weak mistress, forever in the burning shadows of their mysterious seven years… What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me… to this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor between our heads at night.”
Although Wevill was building a successful career of her own, creating popular advertising campaigns and translating the work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, she couldn’t overcome her feelings of inadequacy.
This is evidenced by another entry in her diary:
“She had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have. I should never have looked into Pandora’s box, and now that I have, I am forced to wear her love-widow’s sacking, without any of her compensations… What, in five years’ time, will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I? How much time have I been given? How much time has run out? What have I done with it? Have I used myself to the hilt already? Am I enough for him? AM I ENOUGH FOR HIM?”
This downward spiral would soon come to a tragic end.
Inside The ‘Copycat Suicide’ Of Assia Wevill
In 1968, Assia Wevill wrote a will in which she left to Hughes “my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.”
Several months later, on March 23, 1969, she turned on the gas stove in her London apartment. She mixed a handful of sleeping pills into a glass of water and gave four-year-old Shura a few sips before draining the rest of the concoction herself. Wevill dragged a mattress into the kitchen, sealed the doors and windows, and lay down next to her daughter. They were both found dead a short while later.
The murder-suicide deeply affected Hughes, though he’d already entered into another affair with Carol Orchard, the woman he would marry in 1970.
Find a GraveAssia Wevill with her and Ted Hughes’ daughter, Shura, shortly before the murder-suicide that took both of their lives.
In 2022, Sotheby’s auctioned off four pages of uncompleted and unpublished poems that Hughes wrote following Assia Wevill’s death. The works feature lines like “You were too young to know about death,” and “Nothing matters — the cars on the hillside, the snuggling houses, then later on, in the blue evening, the carlights tearing here & there in the landscape — all to no avail.”
Today, Assia Wevill is largely remembered as the affair partner of Ted Hughes who many believe ripped apart his marriage to Sylvia Plath and pushed her to suicide. But her true legacy is much more complicated.
After reading about the life and tragic death of Assia Wevill, go inside the murder of Mamah Borthwick, the lover of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Then, learn about the controversial relationship of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn.
