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Notes
1. See the 1968 review in The Guardian by CitationP. J. Kavanagh.
2. See CitationJulie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s Reclaiming Assia Wevill for extended discussion about the contexts in which Wevill lived and worked. We learn that Wevill would have come up against far more daunting structural biases in the 1960s than in the twenty-first century. For example, the majority of women did not participate in the labor force in her day: less than half of all women, 40% of those aged 25 to 44, worked for pay in Great Britain in 1961 (CitationSorrentino 33). Indeed, from 1960-1969, approximately 40% of females 15 years of age or older participated in the labor force in Great Britain, with the lowest percentage (39.5%) occurring in 1960 and the highest for the decade (42%) occurring in 1966 (CitationSorrentino 25). In 1969, the year Wevill died, females (15 years or older) constituted 41.8% of the labor force (CitationSorrentino 25). Furthermore, Wevill’s situation was even more unusual when we consider that she not only worked outside of the home but she would have been considered a lone parent with a dependent child after she separated from David Wevill and lived apart from Hughes. For instance, we know that in Great Britain in 1961, only 2% of households contained a lone parent with dependent children (CitationOffice for National Statistics 15). This astoundingly small number suggests the highly unusual nature of Wevill’s situation, especially when we take into account the fact that the Office for National Statistics includes individuals who are not family members as part of a household.
3. Wevill’s letters, journals, original poems, translations of poems, and miscellaneous writing are archived at the British Library, Emory University, Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Yale University. This newly uncovered letter has not yet been deposited in an archive.
4. His poetry collection Capriccio focuses on Wevill, making her the only woman other than Plath whom Hughes treated in a sustained poetic manner. The sequence of poems about her were printed in limited edition art books, but Hughes created something very valuable, pragmatically and symbolically, with Capriccio. Now a collector’s item that sells for exorbitant prices, Capriccio can most easily be accessed in Hughes’s CitationCollected Poems. As for collaboration, Hughes partnered with Wevill on other artistic projects. See CitationYehuda Koren and Eilat Negev’s Lover of Unreason for further exploration of the collaborations and Wevill’s role in supporting Hughes as he pursued his writing.
5. See CitationJonathan Bate’s biography of Hughes for discussions of the impact Wevill made on Hughes’s life and work.
6. In reference to a publisher asking her to translate prose rather than poetry, Wevill flatly refuses (CitationWevill, Collected Writings of Assia Wevill 129).
7. Her first sentence trails off, uncompleted, and she inserts a missing word (“lovely”) in the second (and last) sentence of the body paragraph of the letter.
8. See CitationKoren and Negev; CitationGoodspeed-Chadwick; CitationRichard Farmer’s article “Cinema Advertising and the Sea Witch ‘Lost Island’ Film (1965)” for more information about this groundbreaking example of cinema advertising.
9. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Zs7ag9VaM to view “Lost Island” and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oegqhtAMJc to view “CitationWood-nymph.”
10. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_lqV8hYhU to view the fragments of the film as well as candid footage (“CitationUnfinished 1968”). Emory University holds the only other video recording of Wevill, which consists of less than a minute of black-and-white footage shot by Gerald Hughes, Ted Hughes’s brother, when he was visiting London (CitationGerald Hughes, “Ted and Assia”).
11. See his letter to Jutta and Wolfgang Kaussen, dated November 19, 1997. He describes the Wevill character in one of his poems as “begotten by some big black geni” and another character wonders whether she is “‘tainted with native (Indian or African) blood’” (CitationTed Hughes, Letters 697-98).
12. Wevill writes in her résumé, “I’m half Russian, half German, and half Jewish” (151).