Shura

Shura was the young daughter of Assia Wevill and Ted Hughes, born after Hughes’s wife, Sylvia Plath, died by suicide. At four years old, Shura became part of a family history shaped by bereavement and by the adults’ unresolved grief; her death with her mother in March 1969 gives that history its most devastating turn.

Family and Background

After Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Hughes had another daughter with Wevill, his lover. The two lived together, and Wevill acted as a mother to Plath’s orphaned children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, but she and Hughes never married. Hughes never acknowledged Shura, whom those around her affectionately called by that name. The narrative describes her as beautiful, like her mother, while also making clear that her place in the family remained unrecognized by her father.

Wevill was forty-one when she died. An artist who had escaped the Nazis as a child, she lived with the persistent haunting of Sylvia Plath’s ghost. The account presents this grief as part of the difficult circumstances surrounding her life with Shura, without reducing the child herself to a symbol of that earlier loss.

Death with Assia Wevill

In March 1969, Wevill opened the gas tap. Before lighting the oven, she gave Shura sleeping pills and left her asleep on a mattress in the kitchen. Wevill then lay down on the mattress beside her daughter and embraced her. The narrative’s spare sequence—sedation, gas, the shared mattress, the embrace—ends with both of them dying.

Shura was four. The account identifies Wevill’s act as an expanded suicide, a term used in psychiatry for cases in which a person’s suicide also takes the life of a child. That description marks the event’s clinical category, but the details remain starkly particular: a small child made to sleep, and a mother lying beside her.

Narrative Significance

Shura’s death is linked to Plath’s suicide through the repeated use of gas. The narrative calls the later killing an innovation in a macabre family tradition begun by Plath, framing the recurrence not as an identical repetition but as a new and more encompassing tragedy. It also recalls that Plath’s son Nicholas Hughes died by suicide in Alaska in 2009, extending the account’s pattern of loss across generations and distance.

Shura has no narrated voice of her own in these passages. She appears through the circumstances of her birth, her father’s failure to acknowledge her, her mother’s care for Plath’s children, and the final act that takes both their lives. This limited perspective makes the distinction between family history and individual fate especially consequential: Shura is four years old, not simply an echo of the adults’ past.