Assia Wevill

Assia Wevill

Assia Wevill (May 15, 1927 – March 23, 1969) was a German-born woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Mandate Palestine, then later the United Kingdom. She later had a relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes.

She killed herself and her four-year-old daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed “Shura”) in their London home on March 23, 1969. She used a gas oven in a manner similar to that of Sylvia Plath, who six years earlier had also committed suicide by use of a gas oven.

Background

Assia Gutmann was the daughter of a Jewish physician of Russian origin, Dr. Lonya Gutmann, and a German Lutheran mother, Elizabetha (née Gaedeke). She spent most of her youth in Tel Aviv.

Friends and family described her as a free-spirited young woman. She went out to dance at the British soldiers’ club, where she met Sergeant John Steel, who became her first husband. In 1946, she moved to London with Steel.

According to 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 Canada, where Assia enrolled in the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and met her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsey. 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

Wevill was a refugee from Nazi Germany and 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.

In advertising, she composed the 90-second “Sea Witches” advertisement for a ladies’ hair-dye product, for both television and cinemas. Her biographers Koren and Negev described it as a “breakthrough in type” and a “huge success” that was “applauded in theaters.”

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.” Hughes later wrote:

We didn't find her - she found us. She sniffed us out... She sat there... Slightly filthy with erotic mystery... I saw the dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her, and I knew it.

Plath also noted their chemistry. Soon afterward, Ted and Assia began an affair.

At the time of Plath’s suicide, Wevill was pregnant with Hughes’s child, but she had an abortion soon after Plath’s death.

After Plath’s suicide, Hughes moved Wevill into Court Green (the North Tawton, Devon home he had bought with Plath). Wevill helped to care for Hughes’s and Plath’s two children, Frieda and Nicholas.

A biography of Wevill titled Lover of Unreason included an account that authors Koren and Negev said she used Plath’s items “not out of obsession, but rather for the sake of practicality, as she was maintaining a household for Hughes and his children.”

Most of Hughes’s friends indicated that while he never publicly claimed Shura as his daughter, his sister Olwyn said he did believe the child was his.

In October 2015, BBC Two broadcast the major documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death, which examined Hughes’s life and work and included an examination of the part played by Wevill.

Birth of Alexandra Tatiana Elise (“Shura”)

On 3 March 1965, at age 37, Wevill gave birth to Alexandra Tatiana Elise (“Shura”) while still married to David Wevill.

Death and suicide method

On 23 March 1969, Wevill gassed herself and four-year-old Shura in their London home.

She sealed the kitchen door and window. She took and gave to Shura sleeping pills dissolved in a glass of water. She turned on the gas stove. Wevill and Shura were found lying together on a mattress in the kitchen.

Legacy

Literature and poetry

Ted Hughes’s volume of poetry Crow (1970) was dedicated to the memory of Assia and Shura.

Hughes’s poem “Folktale” included these lines:

She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.

Hughes published half a dozen poems he had written for Assia, which were hidden among the 240 poems in New Selected Poems (1989).

In “The Error.” Hughes wrote:

When her grave opened its ugly mouth why didn't you just fly,
Why did you kneel down at the grave's edge to be identified accused and convicted?

In “The Descent”, he wrote:

your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry,
Took your daughter from you. She was stripped from you,
The last raiment
Clinging round your neck, the sole remnant
Between you and the bed
In the underworld

Wevill appeared as “Helen” in Fay Weldon’s novel Down Among the Women.

Film

In the feature film Sylvia (2003), Wevill was portrayed by Amira Casar.

Other details

A major biographical account described a “Draft Constitution” consisting of two typed pages of instructions from Hughes to Wevill on how to manage his house and children, including dictating what time she should get up.

The same biographical account described Hughes’s mistress for six years as being involved in a narrative of “a domestic tyrant” who issued those instructions.

Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent - Telegraph.co.uk, wrote in September 9, 2006 that “Wevill, 42, gassed herself with Shura, her four-year-old daughter by Hughes, in 1969 after discovering that he was having an affair.” He also wrote that it was an “eery re-enactment” of the suicide six years earlier of the American poet Sylvia Plath.

Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev also disclosed that Hughes and Wevill started sharing Plath’s bed in the London flat where she died within two days of her suicide. They stated that within six weeks, Wevill was using the same bed to recover from an abortion.

Negev said:

“It was loving Ted that cost Assia her life.”