Assia Wevill


Assia Esther Wevill was a German woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Palestine, then later the United Kingdom, where she had a relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes. She killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise using a gas oven, similar to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath's suicide six years earlier.

Early life and marriages

Assia Gutmann was the daughter of a Jewish physician of Latvian origin, Lonya Gutmann, and a German Lutheran mother, Elisabeth "Lisa". Her sister Celia was born on 22 September 1929 and she escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Israel. She spent most of her youth in Tel Aviv. Described by friends and family as a free-spirited young woman, she would go out to dance at the British soldiers' club, where she met Sergeant John Steele, with whom she moved to London in 1946 and who became her first husband in 1947. According to her biographers, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, "she had entered an essentially loveless marriage with an Englishman at the age of 20 – largely to enable her family to emigrate to England." The couple later emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where Assia enrolled at the University of British Columbia and met her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsey. Assia and Steele divorced in 1949 and she married Lipsey in 1952.
In 1956, on a ship to London, she met the 21-year-old poet David Wevill. They began an affair and Assia divorced Lipsey; she married Wevill in 1960.

Career

Assia was linguistically gifted. She had a successful career in advertising and was an aspiring poet who published, under her maiden name Assia Gutmann, an English translation of the work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Ted Hughes

In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat in Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London, to Assia and David Wevill, and took up residence at North Tawton, Devon. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. He later wrote:
Plath noted their chemistry. Soon afterward, Hughes and Assia began an affair. At the time of Plath's suicide, Assia was pregnant with Hughes's child, but she had an abortion soon after Plath's death. The actual relationship, who instigated it, and its circumstances, have been hotly debated for many years.
After Plath's suicide, Hughes moved Assia into Court Green, where Assia helped care for Hughes's and Plath's two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Assia was reportedly haunted by Plath's memory; she even began using things that had once belonged to Plath. In their biography of Assia, Lover of Unreason, Koren and Negev maintain that she used Plath's items not from obsession, but for the sake of practicality since she was maintaining a household for Hughes and his children. On 3 March 1965, at age 37, Assia gave birth to Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura, while still married to David Wevill.
Ostracized by her lover's friends and family, and eclipsed by the figure of Plath in public life, Assia became anxious and suspicious of Hughes's infidelity, which was real enough. Hughes began affairs with Brenda Hedden, a married acquaintance who frequented their home, and Carol Orchard, a nurse 20 years his junior, whom he would later marry in 1970. Assia's relationship with Hughes was also fraught with other complexities, as shown by a collection of his letters to her acquired by Emory University. She was continually distraught by his reluctance to marry her and establish a home together, as well as his treatment of her as a "housekeeper". While he never publicly claimed Shura as his daughter, his sister Olwyn said that she believed the child was his.

Death

On 23 March 1969, Assia killed herself and four-year-old Shura in their London home at 3 Okeover Manor, Clapham Common. She had first sealed the kitchen door and window, then dissolved sleeping pills in a glass of water, chased with whisky, and then turned on the gas stove. She and Shura were found by the family's German au pair, Else Ludwig, lying together on a mattress in the kitchen.

Legacy

In advertising

Assia composed the 90-second "Lost Island" advertisement for "Sea Witches" ladies' hair-dye product for both television and cinemas, called a "breakthrough in type" and a "huge success" by her biographers, Koren and Negev, that was "applauded in theaters." The advert can be viewed in some classic ad compilations or sometimes as an online posting.

In literature