Lives Revised - by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In Lives Revised, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick engages the entangled life stories of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath to recover details, nuances, and perspectives excluded from previous biographies. Based on extensive archival work at the British Library and Emory University, as well as unpublished materials in private hands, Goodspeed-Chadwick considers how biographical storylines are constructed, reconceived, and dismantled across decades of research and interpretation. Her work plumbs the practical challenges and interpretive possibilities of biographies that engage with difficult subjects such as Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, particularly given the personal traumas, tragic ends, and competing legacies involved. Drawing on documents and recordings only recently made available to researchers, Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath recovers previously inaccessible accounts about its subjects, contextualizes them within the critical traditions of feminism and trauma studies, and asks readers and scholars to rethink previous conclusions about three complex figures in literary and cultural history"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2025 Lewis P. Simpson Award

In Lives Revised, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick engages the entangled life stories of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath to recover details, nuances, and perspectives excluded from previous biographies. Based on extensive archival work at the British Library and Emory University, as well as unpublished materials in private hands, Goodspeed-Chadwick considers how biographical storylines are constructed, reconceived, and dismantled across decades of research and interpretation. Her work plumbs the practical challenges and interpretive possibilities of biographies that engage with difficult subjects such as Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, particularly given the personal traumas, tragic ends, and competing legacies involved.

Drawing on documents and recordings only recently made available to researchers, Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath recovers previously inaccessible accounts about its subjects, contextualizes them within the critical traditions of feminism and trauma studies, and asks readers and scholars to rethink previous conclusions about three complex figures in literary and cultural history.

Review Quotes

"Even if you have read every biography of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath, this revisionist account of all three will startle you. Julie Goodspeed Chadwick has made the most of her access to recently opened archives, providing not only greater insight into the lives and works of these three controversial figures but also a profound exploration of why the same lives are rewritten in one biography after another."--Carl Rollyson in The New York Sun

"Goodspeed-Chadwick's research is meticulous, yet this study wears that weight lightly. This study attends to Wevill and Hughes in all their complexities and lived experiences, seeking to pull back the layers of myth that have accrued to their stories. Grounding her analysis in painstaking archival work, Goodspeed-- Chadwick makes a compelling argument for Wevill's significance."--Deborah M. Mix, author of A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women's Innovative Writing

"In working so closely with new archival documents and in tandem with existing resources and scholarship, Goodspeed-Chadwick assimilates a vast amount of information for the modern reader of Assia Wevill and the other major literary figures with whom she intersects. Lives Revised further fills in pieces of the puzzle and brings us closer to a comprehensive portrait of Wevill."--Peter K. Steinberg, editor of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath and coeditor of The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill and The Letters of Sylvia Plath

"Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick's latest contribution to our understanding of Assia Wevill's life is vital work. Built around crucial, newly accessible archival material, Lives Revised upends longstanding master narratives through a careful investigation of the early frameworks that have determined so much of our 'knowledge' about Wevill and Hughes. This is revelatory scholarship at its finest."--Janet Badia, author of Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

"Refusing to play the blame game, Goodspeed-Chadwick neither casts judgment on these tragically entangled writers nor pits them against one another. Instead, she seeks an empathetic understanding of Wevill, Hughes, and Plath. This book does not shy away from their disastrous decisions. But it insists on an ethical approach grounded in trauma studies---how would we respond to similar circumstances?"--Marsha Bryant, author of Women's Poetry and Popular Culture

"This book is a truly scholarly work, setting straight a bevy of misinformation disseminated through this past half-century of biography and criticism. Goodspeed--Chadwick draws on a great deal of archival and personally held material to finally create a full picture of not only Wevill and Hughes, but also of Plath. Any reader will benefit from her wealth of knowledge."--Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Biography and Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life and editor of Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage

"This deeply human study by the foremost expert on the life and writing of Assia Wevill does its subjects the great service of not only dismantling the lore surrounding them, but also explaining the processes of lore-making that have the potential to thwart our full participation in biographical narrative as a personally meaningful endeavor. Goodspeed-Chadwick's trauma-informed framework provides the ethical imperative and the tools to rethink the study of life writing and the default categories that shape--even warp--such work, particularly in writing about women and power. Her strategy of thoroughly analyzing a wide range of contrasting accounts from the archive is convincing. This book tells us what we don't know about Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, and in so doing illuminates the limits of biographical knowledge--and what happens when we fail to navigate those limits with humility and care for the pain of others."--Janine Utell, author of Literary Couples and Twentieth--Century Life Writing: Narrative and Intimacy

"Assia Wevill, the shadowy third woman in the tragic triangle of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, comes blazingly alive in this groundbreaking and compassionate study by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick. An essential addition to the field."--Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

"Drawing upon new sources, Goodspeed-Chadwick enriches our understanding of Assia and Ted's story, and blows open the misogynistic and sexist tropes that have calcified around the Assia-Ted-Sylvia triangle. Goodspeed-Chadwick rewrites Assia back into literary history, and reveals the biases that prevented her life from receiving the respect and attention it deserves. This book not only restores Assia Wevill's humanity but also offers new paradigms for feminist biography."--Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath