In her Ms. article, Rosenstein employs religious language in describing the already fractured audience of “apostles” and “infidels” that clashed over Plath. “Sects” and “schisms” threatened to overwhelm their subject, now the center of a “Holy War.” That Rosenstein was taking issue with all sides should have put her in a prime position to write a truly independent biography. She understood why Plath’s use of anger and her exploration of women’s lives and domestic routines should make her an icon for the feminist movement and a startling new figure in the history of Anglo-American literature. At the same time, the biographer expressed concern that Plath’s own voice had been drowned out by programmatic arguments about what she stood for. Distinctions had to be made between Plath as a representative figure and Plath’s singularity.
Writing on 23 November 1973 to Clare Court, a Court Green neighbor who had incurred Olwyn’s wrath by writing a letter to the TLS praising Plath, A. Alvarez noted: “Miss Rosenstein seems better than most … She seems very thorough and also independent—though how long that will last, heaven only knows.… But I must confess that it’s depressing to think that the unspeakable Olywn Hughes has managed to bully and insult you, too, into silence. She has tried that tactic on so many people that I despair of the truth of that sordid and tragic affair ever emerging.” Poor Clare Court, she had been charmed by Sylvia’s stories of the swifts, who took the thatch from her home to build nests of their own.
Perhaps the recalcitrance of the Plath estate was, in the end, enough to prevent Rosenstein from ever publishing her biography. She may also have been aware of another contender, Elizabeth Hinchliffe, a graduate of Wellesley High School, a Mademoiselle guest editor, and the author of a Wellesley College honors thesis on Plath. Hinchliffe had also spent her freshman year at Smith, thus appearing as yet another double that Plath herself would have appreciated. Judging by a manuscript in the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland in College Park, and by her correspondence in the Alvarez papers at the British Library, Hinchliffe did considerable research and interviewing, gathering intimate and even gruesome details that would not have served her well in dealings with the Plath estate. The Plath archives are silent on what happened to the Hinchliffe biography. McCullough’s collection at the University of Maryland includes a letter from Olywn deeming Hinchliff’s work “highly offensive and ludicrous.” Ted Hughes later wrote to poet and biographer Andrew Motion about biographers who had come to grief attempting to write about Sylvia, noting that Linda Wagner-Martin was “so insensitive that she’s evidently escaped the usual effects of undertaking this particular job—i.e. mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe—which in the past have saved us from several travesties of this kind being completed.”
By 1973, Edward Butscher, not a timid soul, was already well on his way to producing the first full-length Plath biography, discovering that “English authors … reluctantly refused to see me on the ground that they could not reveal the truth of Sylvia’s last years and still maintain social and/or business ties with Ted and Olwyn Hughes.” Elizabeth Compton, a Devon neighbor of Sylvia’s, wrote to Butscher, “If you wrote what I knew of Sylvia you could not publish it because Ted & Olwyn would sue you. ‘The truth about Sylvia can only be told when you are dying,’ Ted told me some weeks back.”
Olwyn met with Butscher three times and responded in writing to his queries. At one point, she offered to act as his agent in the UK if he submitted his book to her and she approved of it. In early 1975, Olwyn sent detailed corrections of Butscher’s biography, objecting, especially, to his sympathetic account of Sylvia after Ted had left her. In Olwyn’s version, Sylvia had been aggressively jealous and had driven Ted out of his own home, thus making it certain he would turn to Assia, whose own behavior is excused because she was so much in love with Ted. Olwyn, seeking to mitigate Ted’s treatment of Sylvia, campaigned relentlessly for a positive portrayal of Assia’s actions—even securing Assia’s friend, Edward Lucie-Smith, to write a character study that would soften her image in Butscher’s book.
On 7 April 1975, Butscher replied, thanking Olwyn for saving him from some embarrassing errors, but also admitting he found her “massive missive” annoying. He answered Olwyn’s concerns point-by-point, identifying sources and pointing out that many of her objections were to Sylvia’s point of view, which the biographer was trying to honor. He did not intend to rewrite the book. When Olwyn demanded more changes and mentioned her intention to contact Butscher’s publisher, he replied on 5 May 1975 that he deemed her response a threat. He encouraged her to carry through with it, saying Continuum Books would be delighted to advertise his biography as “THE BOOK THE HUGHES TRIED TO SUPPRESS!” He also wanted her to know that he had engaged a lawyer who had vetted his book and assured him he would win any legal action brought against him (Olywn had already suggested that certain passages might be libelous). Although he had initially believed in her sincerity, he now realized that too many of her “recent suggestions smack of a whitewash.” He agreed to change some other wording at her suggestion, but that was as far as he could go. If he was denied permission to quote from Plath’s work, the biographer promised to mount a letter-writing campaign to literary journals and newspapers decrying Olwyn’s “pre-censorship” and “heavy-handed tactics,” which would also be a subject of the preface to his biography. He did not consider these proposed actions threats—just aids to fulfilling his duty to “literature and objective scholarship.”
Olwyn’s reply on 12 May was forbearing, suggesting that Butscher’s “rage” was the result of her hastily composed letter, which she had dispatched too soon because of the press of other business. But well into mid-July 1975, when the book was in the proofs stage and corrections would be costly to the author and publisher, Olwyn was still requesting changes and cuts—even after she had endorsed Harper’s grant of permission to quote from Plath’s work. Butscher agreed to a few more alterations, telling Olwyn it was too late to do anything more. Three years later, she engaged in correspondence with Peter Owen, Butscher’s publisher for a collection of essays, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, complaining about the “horrible Butscher” as a “revengeful little sod.”
Reviewing Letters Home in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 November 1975), poet and novelist Erica Jong complained that Plath’s work had been muddled by “relatives of hers … anxious … to suppress the truth.” To Jong, Ted, Olwyn, and Aurelia were no better than other commentators who had “axes to grind.” In The National Observer (10 January 1976), Anne Tyler, a highly regarded novelist, was equally excoriating, calling the Sylvia of Letters Home a “wax image,” and the collection not much better than a family scrapbook. In the Southwest Review (Summer 1976), scholar Jo Brans questioned the “reliability of the letters because of their editing.” So many ellipses suggested tendentiousness. Aurelia’s italicized commentary was dismissed as reductive rationalization.
Edward Butscher’s Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, appearing at almost the same time as the publication of Letters Home, provided an explanation for readers who puzzled over how the dutiful daughter in Aurelia’s book could possibly have written the searing verse of Sylvia’s final year. The biographer argued that Plath had to shed her female modesty and middle-class values to become the “bitch goddess” entirely consumed by her art. Like several critics, Sylvia’s friend, Phil McCurdy, thought Butscher had pushed his thesis too far. “You reify too many traits,” he wrote the biographer. In a subsequent letter to Butscher, McCurdy expressed his gratitude to Sylvia, who had made him a better man. “If it was just part of an unhealthy, manipulative—even unconscious—rationale on her part, I’m sure glad I was one of the objects!”