Never-before-seen handwritten poems by the late poet show his grief after his partner’s suicide, just six years after his first wife Sylvia Plath’s. A series of unpublished poems written by Ted Hughes immediately after the tragic deaths of Assia Gutmann Wevill and their daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise, known as Shura, might change the prevalent view of Ted Hughes as a […]
Hi Friends and Followers, Recently I was given the opportunity to give a author talk on Zoom, through Randwick City Library in NSW Australia. Even though I was 4,000 km away in Darwin, NT, the TopEnd of Oz, I felt as if I were in the same room as Helene and my guests, who tuned in online through the miracle […]
In his article on the original Capriccio (Ted Hughes Society Journal Vol 8 Issue 2) Steve Ely discusses both the importance of the engravings by Leonard Baskin, and the relevance of Assia Wevill to the poetry. I found this article fascinating in Ely’s description of the collaboration between Hughe and Baskin. However I found it unsympathetic to Assia, describing her […]
If Assia, named Esther in my novel. ‘Capriccio’, had lived to see this day, she would have reached the grand old age of ninety-three. Instead, in a moment of madness, she took her own life, and that of her daughter with Ted Hughes, at the age of forty-one. A double tragedy, undoubtedly caused by her stormy relationship with Hughes, and […]
‘To value a piece of work does not require us to applaud its creator.” (Ashleigh Wilson, On Artists, MUP, 2019) Or does it? Do we have to love the artist to love the work? Think of Pablo Picasso, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen. All can be judged as having questionable morals. If, like me, you’ve always enjoyed movies such as Allen’s […]
This is an abridged version of the article by Eilat Negev, which inspired me to write the story of Assia Gutmann Wevill as a work of fiction.
AUTHOR TALK: Dina Davis with Susannah Fullerton. Review by Susan Beinart On 3 February 2019, Waverley Library Theatrette resounded with the voices of Dina Davis in conversation with Susannah Fullerton, at the Sydney launch of Dina’s début work, Capriccio: A Novel. This novel was inspired by the lives of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. This roman à clef covers the love-triangle that played out between these three poets, highlighting, for the first time, Wevill’s role in this fascinating tale. Fullerton, well known at Library events for her deep knowledge of Jane Austen and other historical writers, asked Davis probing questions about Capriccio: A Novel. Davis answered Fullerton’s questions with passion and honesty. The conversation flowed and the audience was riveted. We learned much about Capriccio: A Novel, including that Davis wrote it with commitment, partly because she felt passionate about the single-mother plight of Wevill, who had, apart from a biography, thus far escaped literary interest. No longer. This fine novel will surely provoke more interest in Wevill, who is known as ‘Esther’ in the book. Names of all the protagonists were changed at the request of the Hughes Estate. PAGE 2 Adapted from Friends of the Waverley Library Newsletter, SPRING 2019
I am excited to announce the forthcoming publication of my work of fiction, ‘Capriccio: a Novel’. To honour the occasion I will be seting up a new website where I will post background information on the real story behind the book. My brand new Website “CAPRICCIOTHE NOVEL” is coming soon! Here you can read articles and see photos of the real story behind “Capriccio: A Novel”, soon to be published by Cilento Press. I took the title of my novel from a series of poems by Ted Hughes, which were written about his relationship with Assia Gutmann Wevill. My book tells the story of their love affair, from the viewpoint of the woman who came between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Apart from one biography, ‘Lover of Unreason” by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren, Assia herself has been written out of history, or else maligned by the brief mentions she gets in many of the reference books about this famous love triangle. My novel aims to redress the balance, and to restore Assia to her proper place in literary history. WATCH THIS SPACE FOR COVER PHOTO, BLURB, AND MORE DETAILS COMNG SOON!
Image courtesy wikipedia I’ve had the privilege recently of attending a course on the ancient texts of the Kabbalah, presented by Rabbi Dr. Orna Triguboff. These mystical teachings have long been a fascination of mine, particularly after I discovered, while researching my novel ‘Capriccio’, about the poet Ted Hughes, that he drew inspiration and poetic imagery from the texts of Kabbalah. Our […]
This review by Mark Ford of ‘Ted Hughes: the Unauthorised Life’ by Jonathan Bates, gives an interesting slant on Bate’s book, and echoes much of the portrayal of Hughes’s remorse in my novel: ‘Capriccio: the Haunting of Sylvia Plath.‘ In March 1969 Assia gassed both herself and her four-year-old daughter by Hughes, Shura, in her flat in Clapham. She had grown tired of sharing Hughes with his two women down in Devon, Brenda Hedden (a social worker) and Carol Orchard, a local farmer’s daughter and nurse, who would become his second wife. Hughes did, on occasion, explicitly question the implications of his … behaviour in his private journal, noting, for instance, of this particular erotic triangle: ‘3 beautiful women – all in love, and a separate life of joy visible with each, all possessed – but own soul lost.’ The sorrows of the polygamist … As the errant poet struggled to manage his handily alphabetised commitments to A, B and C, as he referred to them in his journal, Assia battled with the complexities of the situation in which she found herself after Plath’s suicide. Although less jealous and possessive than Plath, Assia had her own moments of despair and fury: in a will she made in April 1968 she left to Hughes only ‘my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.’ Hughes’s ‘The Error’, from the suite of Assia poems collected in Capriccio (1990), presents her subsequent death as almost […]
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Dina Davis Author 