It does not seem possible to discern any consistency or logic in Hughes’s management of his papers and Plath’s, perhaps because his view of their marriage kept changing. To Myers, Hughes wrote that he regretted, for example, that he had colluded in the publication of Letters Home, which burnished the myth of Sylvia as martyr and absolved Aurelia. The problem, Hughes told Myers, was that he had “coddled Sylvia”—the very point that Dido Merwin had driven home in her memoir. He should just have carried on in his own way instead of deferring to Plath, Hughes concluded.

By mid-1987, Anne Stevenson had abandoned the Viking Penguin project for a full-length biography to be published by Houghton Mifflin and supervised by the heavy-handed Olwyn. Stevenson possessed a promising background for a Plath biographer. She was an American who made England her home. She was a member of Plath’s generation. She was a poet. As she wrote to her editor, Peter Davison, on 29 December 1986, she understood Plath’s “uncanny identification with archetypal myth-figures (Isis, the Black Goddess) and her striving to be both antitheses of herself: Successful American Woman on Smith Girl lines and Great Imaginary Poet-Earth Goddess.…”

But almost immediately, Stevenson ran into trouble, reporting to Davison on 25 February 1987, that she had little direct access to Ted and could not “get around” Olwyn’s “fixed ideas” about him. After a trip to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Stevenson wrote her editor that Olwyn could not see how her own biases interfered with the biography Anne wanted to write. At the Lilly, Anne discovered a letter Sylvia wrote over the 1960–61 Christmas holiday during a visit to the Hughes home. Sylvia had adopted her customary absolutist reaction to personal criticism: “Olwyn made such a painful scene that I can never stay under the same roof with her again. She has never hidden her resentment of me and her relation to Ted is really quite pathological.” Although Anne had come to discount many of Sylvia’s extreme statements—especially her attacks on Ted after their marriage broke up—on the subject of Olwyn, Anne was “beginning to think Sylvia was right.”

Olwyn was an indispensable resource for Stevenson, who gained access to papers and interviewees unavailable to previous biographers. Davison, no fan of Sylvia’s, believed that Stevenson had the opportunity to dispel the myth of the martyred Sylvia, but he realized that Olwyn was getting in the way. When he asked her to let Stevenson alone, an offended Olwyn shot back at Stevenson on 20 August 1987, denying that she was trying to “run the show.” To Davison, Olwyn expressed her anger at “Anne’s ferocious (on occasions) resentment of my help.” The biographer’s insinuation that Olwyn was trying to “sway the tenor of the book,” and Davison’s belief that Anne could do the book on her own depressed Olwyn, who did not see how Anne could get on without “constant hints, help and overseeing.” As usual, Olwyn objected to the portrayal of Ted, claiming that material Stevenson wanted to include was “slanderous.” Even worse, in a letter to Anne on 13 September, Olwyn accused the biographer of identifying with her subject! Beware of empathy, Olwyn admonished. She assured Anne she was nothing like Sylvia, even if Anne—Olwyn averred—now and then threw a Sylvia-like tantrum.

Davison stood by his author, telling Olwyn that he sympathized with “Anne’s feeling that you sometimes give the sense of looking over her shoulder. It is hard enough to decide what to write on a page without imagining someone else is listening.…” But Olwyn declared Stevenson was hardly better than the “appalling Wagner.” Olwyn had, in short, “backed the wrong horse.” Davison jockeyed between Stevenson and Hughes, bolstering the former and placating the latter. While Stevenson worried that the book would ruin her reputation, Olwyn asserted she was saving the biographer’s good name and demanded 25 percent of the royalties for all her work, which had kept Anne up to the mark. Davison, with a book seven months overdue, finally lost patience and flatly told Olwyn in a letter dated 13 January 1988 that he was near the point of withdrawing the book from publication. Olwyn, he said, had taken it over, inserting passages in her own style that clashed with Anne’s. Even worse, Olwyn demanded 40 percent of the royalties, a demand that Edward Lucie-Smith, one of Olwyn’s friends, would not have been surprised to learn about. As much as he loved Olwyn, he had told Edward Butscher that she was a “cow” about business. Davison could not make it plainer to her: If Olwyn did not approve the manuscript the publisher would be sending her in three days, Stevenson’s biography would be cancelled for “non-delivery.”

In a letter dated 17 February and marked “not sent,” a fed up Davison summed up Olwyn’s attitude: “Something is wrong. Someone has blundered. You do not approve, you are not satisfied, and you will withdraw Ted’s statement, or Ted’s permission to quote his letters…” He had no reason to suppose any text he edited would “receive approval from you.” Davison concluded that it simply was not possible for Olwyn to “let go.” Olwyn wore “too many hats.” Many years later Davison confided to Smith archivist Karen V. Kukil that in the normal course of things, his correspondence would have been shredded. In this case, however, he wanted a record of what had happened.

Why such a savvy editor permitted himself to become mired in such a mess deserves comment. Davison had been enticed by the access that not only Olwyn but also Ted (who had lunched with Davison and talked over the biography) promised. But access, it turned out, meant adherence to Olwyn’s ever-expanding provisos. Ironically, she exhibited exactly the kind of monomaniacal behavior that she attributed to Sylvia. In his unsent letter, Davison said he had come to realize that Sylvia had poisoned Olwyn’s life. But when both Olwyn and Anne both agreed to abide by Davison’s adjudication of their work, he decided to proceed, noting that the book had “survived, barely, a series of major operations, during which the doctors seemed to have disagreed in their diagnoses and prescriptions.” Warfare continued, with Anne charging, “Whatever Sylvia’s faults, she cannot have been more self-blind or perverse in her treatment of people she tried to use than yourself,” and Olwyn replying that Stevenson was thwarting her “in Sylvia fashion.”

The result was very close to what Olwyn wanted. She had worn down both editor and biographer to the point where Olwyn begrudgingly called the book “ok.” Making the best of it, Davison wrote both of them to say how pleased he was with the book that was now balanced between Anne’s “softness” and Olwyn’s “asperity.” When the biography appeared, to mixed reviews, it contained Anne Stevenson’s note stating that Bitter Fame was virtually a work of joint authorship—an admission Olwyn had resisted, but settled for in lieu of putting herself forward as the book’s co-biographer.

On 22 April 1989, The Independent published a long letter from Hughes rebutting several charges made against him by Ronald Hayman, who linked Hughes’s alleged neglect of Plath’s grave with his appalling handling of her estate and her biographers. Hughes rightly noted he had never taken court action against a biographer, but he acknowledged that the estate had denied biographers permission to quote from Plath’s work, in effect using copyright as a form of censorship. He seemed to think that just because the biographers had been able to publish, no harm had been done. As for her grave, he confessed his inability to maintain the site because of constant pilfering and defacement of her stone (three times the name Hughes had been gouged out so that only the name Sylvia Plath remained). To Hughes, such desecration confirmed his belief that his own right to commemorate Plath had been debased.