Assia Esther Wevill (néeGutmann; 15 May 1927 – 23 March 1969) was a German-Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, via Italy, then later England, where she had an affair with the English poet Ted Hughes. While she was a successful advertising copywriter and a talented translator of poetry, she is mainly remembered in the context of her relationship with Sylvia Plath and Hughes.
Assia Gutmann was the daughter of a Jewish physician of Latvian origin, Lonya Gutmann, and a German Lutheran mother, Elisabeth "Lisa" (née Gaedeke).[1] Her sister Celia was born on 22 September 1929. They escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. 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[citation needed] and who became her first husband in 1947.[2]
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 immigrate to England."[3] The couple later immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where Gutmann enrolled at the University of British Columbia and met the man who would become her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsey.[4] Gutmann and Steele divorced in 1949[5] and she married Lipsey in 1952.[2]
In 1956, on a ship to London, she met the 21-year-old Canadian poet David Wevill. They began an affair and Gutmann divorced Lipsey; she and Wevill married in 1960.[6]
Wevill had a successful career in advertising[7] and was an aspiring poet who published, under her maiden name Assia Gutmann, an English translation of the work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.[8][9]
Plath noted their chemistry. Soon afterward, Hughes and Wevill began an affair. At the time of Plath's suicide, Wevill was pregnant with Hughes' child, but she had an abortion soon after Plath's death. The actual relationship, who instigated it and its circumstances, has been hotly debated for many years.[11]
After Plath's suicide, Hughes moved Wevill into Court Green (the Devon home at North Tawton he had bought with Plath), where Wevill helped care for Hughes & Plath's two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Wevill was reportedly haunted by Plath's memory; she even began using things that had once belonged to Plath.[12] In their biography of Wevill, 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, Wevill gave birth to Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura, while still married to David Wevill.
Ostracized by her lover's friends and family,[13][11] and eclipsed by the figure of Plath in public life, Wevill became anxious and suspicious of Hughes' infidelity. 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. Wevill's relationship with Hughes was also fraught with other complexities, as shown by a collection of his letters to her acquired by Emory University.[14] 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".[15] In his letter to Leonard Baskin on 16 July 1969, Hughes references Shura, his daughter with Wevill. He writes, "I have two nice children who make life a great pleasure.... I had a third, a little marvel, but she died with her mother."[16]
On 23 March 1969, Wevill died by suicide and killed her four-year-old Shura in their London home. Wevill followed Plath in utilising the gas supply from an unlit oven.[17] She turned the oven on but didn't light it, put sleeping pills in a glass of water, consuming half herself and giving half to her four-year-old daughter, and then they both went to sleep.[18]
Wevill composed the 90-second "Lost Island" advertisement for "Sea Witches" ladies' hair-dye product for 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.[7][19]
In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes's life and work, and included an examination of the part played by Wevill.[21]
