British Library buys archive of Hughes and Plath letters

THE British Library has acquired a significant collection of letters sent by the late Yorkshire-born Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and his wife, the American writer Sylvia Plath.

The announcement was made at the sixth International Ted Hughes Conference at Pembroke College in Cambridge, and the letters were sent to Hughes’s sister, Olwyn.

The archive contains 41 letters from Hughes and Plath along with literary papers including early poetry and prose drafts and some previously unpublished material.

The total cost of purchasing the archive of Olwyn Hughes was 29,500. It will now be catalogued and made accessible to researchers at the British Library by early next year.

The unpublished material by Hughes includes a partial handwritten draft of an untitled play and unpublished poems that are believed to date from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The literary drafts in the archive highlight the creative development of both poets and many of the drafts were later published in Lupercal and The Colossus in 1960 by Hughes and Plath, respectively.

The letters, which date from 1954 to 1964, shed light on different aspects of Hughes’s life and early career including his time spent in the US and the marriage to Plath, which ended in tragedy when she took her own life.