  When I first began reading Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband , I was disappointed. "This is all the stuff I already know," I thought. "St. Botolph's...black marauder...pushy American girl...I've read this all before. Where's the new stuff? " Plath fans like myself, who've read every biography and scrutinized every poem, need to hang in there for a bit. It takes a while to tap the riches in this book, but once you hit pay dirt, you'll be buried in it. You can expect nothing less from Diane Middlebrook's exhaustive research and crisp, yet sensitive writing. The book is essentially a biography of Ted Hughes, but it is a biography of Hughes in relation to Plath -- possibly the only kind of biography that could ever be written about Ted Hughes. Middlebrook takes what has been said over and over about Hughes and Plath -- that they were larger-than-life, highly charismatic, very intense people -- and digs deep with research and literary analysis. The result is two fully-fleshed mythical figures, with the history of -- and reasons for -- the shaping of their mythic status. Speaking of the literary analysis, it is incredibly detailed, dissected to a dizzying extent. Middlebrook is quite a scholar, and makes bold connections between various Plath and Hughes poems (some of which were written on opposite sides of the same piece of paper -- a practice Middlebrook calls Plath & Hughes's "hand-to-hand combat").
The poems take on squirming new life in the illumination Middlebrook provides. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were complex, inscrutable people. They believed their relationship was fated, and that indeed seems to have been the case. They goaded each other to produce writing that was better and more unique than anything else being written at the time. The destruction of their marriage was the catalyst for Plath's final poems, the ones that would guarantee her immortality.
It's hard to know how to feel about Ted Hughes. I have a lot more interest in, and respsect for, him after reading this book. One thing is certain -- he is the only man who could have endured life in the shadow of Sylvia Plath. A hunter, a creator of myths, only his questing, questioning nature could have been strong enough to stand up to all Plath threw at him, in life and in death. 
