Assia Wevill

Assia Wevill was an artist and Ted Hughes’s lover after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. In March 1969, at forty-one, she died by gas poisoning alongside her four-year-old daughter Shura. The book presents her death as both a personal catastrophe and a repetition of a pattern first associated with Plath, one that later reaches beyond Assia’s household to Alaska.

Identity and Background

Assia was a half-Jewish artist who had escaped the Nazis as a child. The brief account of her life sets that early escape against the fatal ending: a woman who had survived persecution in childhood would die decades later in a kitchen with her own young daughter.

Life with Ted Hughes and the Children

After Plath’s suicide, Ted Hughes had another daughter with Assia. They lived together, and Assia acted as a mother to Plath’s orphaned children, Frieda and Nicholas. Hughes and Assia never married, and he never acknowledged their daughter, Shura, whom those around her affectionately called by that name. The account describes Shura as a little girl as beautiful as her mother, while making clear that her place in the family was not publicly recognized by Hughes.

Death with Shura

The book says that life became difficult and that Plath’s ghost haunted Assia relentlessly. In March 1969, Assia turned on the gas, repeating the method associated with Plath but adding a devastating difference: before lighting the gas, she gave Shura sleeping pills and left her asleep on a mattress in the kitchen. Assia then lay down beside her and held her as they died. Shura was four; Assia was forty-one.

Psychiatry uses the term extended suicide for cases of this kind. The detail of Assia embracing her daughter makes the scene at once intimate and irreversible: the same gesture of care that had marked her role in the household accompanies the act that ends both their lives. The book supplies the circumstances but does not offer a further explanation of Assia’s motives.

Repetition and Aftermath

Assia’s death is placed in a chain that begins with Plath’s suicide and continues beyond Assia and Shura. Plath’s son Nicholas Hughes also died by suicide in Alaska in 2009. The narrative calls this the macabre family tradition extending as far as Alaska, framing Assia’s death not as an isolated episode but as one part of a recurring history of loss. That framing does not erase the differences between the people involved; it makes repetition itself the disturbing connection.