The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Hughes. “Dreamers.” Jonathan Bate confirms the truth of this statement in his 2015 biography of Hughes, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. London: Harper Collins, 2016, 230.

2 Robin Morgan was the first writer to name Assia and Shura Wevill, although she called her by her maiden name, Gutman. Morgan was also the first to note her suicide, in her poem “Arraignment,” which was included in her 1972 book Monster. New York: Vintage Random House, 76-8. Harriet Rosenstein’s book on Sylvia Plath was never published, but her research files are at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Room. Assia and Shura are mentioned with frequency in her interviews with Plath’s friends from the last year of her life, such as Elizabeth Sigmund.

3 Negev and Koren, “On The Trail Of Assia.”

4 Ann Skea, “The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill,” Eclectica 23, No.3, July/August 2022, https://www.eclectica.org/v26n3/skea_wevill.html and Emily Cooke, “She Would Quite Like to Kill Me,” The Poetry Foundation, 6 December 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/156868/she-would-quite-like-to-kill-me.

5 Wevill, The Collected Letters of Assia Wevill, letter of October 9, 1955 to Celia Chaiken, 66.

6 Ibid., letter of September 15, 1954, 60.

7 Ibid., letter to Lonya Guttman, circa January 1969, 155.

8 Ibid., 783-84.

9 Ibid., letter to Yehuda and Hana Sokolov-Amichai, circa December 1968, 154.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., Yehuda Amichai, “Like Our Bodies’ Imprint,” trans. Assia Wevill, 235.

13 Ibid., journal entry of May 19, 1963, 163.

14 Most recently, Heather Clark quoted this line in its entirety in Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, writing, “Assia was all too aware of how small she stood in Sylvia’s shadow.” New York: Knopf, 2020, 913. Jonathan Bate also wrote about this in Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life: “She could not help comparing herself with Sylvia. She wallowed in the manuscript notebooks among the Plath papers and typed a bitter journal piece about her strong sense of [Sylvia].” United Kingdom: William Collins, 2015, 304.

15 Ibid., The Collected Letters of Assia Wevill, journal entry of May 20, 1963, 166.