Poet Elaine Feinstein knew Ted Hughes, and in the first biography of the great poet (who died in 1998) gives an even-handed account of his tempestuous life, haunted as it was until his death by his wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963, and by the later, copycat suicide of another lover.
Feinstein gets the basic facts down and shows us the shape of the poet’s life, including his persistent interest in the occult, though she rather glides over his complex love-life. Compared to, say, Emma Tennant’s memo Burnt Diaries (which deals in part with her affair with Hughes in the 1970s) Feinstein barely conveys the man’s charisma. In the end, the biography feels rather pale and superficial.
Feinstein mines Hughes’s poems for biographical information, but often seems insensitive to their emotional thrust. Also, to borrow from Hughes, her prose is “log-like”.