HAPPY 52th BIRTHDAY, Frieda Hughes!!! :)
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Picture via
Location: New York, NY, US
Date taken: October 1998
Photographer: Ted Thai
I don’t think Ted and Nick look(ed) alike… not at all… not like Sylvia and Frieda do.
But the background makes these two pics look like one. And nature and wildlife has always been connecting father and son.
The Nicholas Hughes-Week!
Another week, another theme… this week, I would like to dedicate to Nicholas Hughes, since the 3rd anniversary of his death is coming up on Friday.
Enjoy! :)
Ted with Assia and Shura, London, 1967
(courtesy of Celia Chaikin)
Source: “Lover of Unreason. Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love” by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev
Shura’s Birth
There was a snowstorm on [Wednesday] 3 March 1965, when Assia was admitted to the delivery room of Charing Cross Hospital [in London]. She was in labor for nine hours, which were quite bearable except for the last 45 minutes. “I emerged whole, ecstatic (in which condition I have been for ten days) and so did my daughter Shura (to rhyme with Jura) whose full name is Alexandra Tatiana Elise,” she joyfully informed Lucas Meyers. “Miraculously unwrinkled, with black hair, very long, and North Sea blue eyes— skin fair as sweet friar, very equable, tactful, grave, very touching. Above all very touching.” Influenced by Hughes’s fascination with astrology, she wrote down the hour of birth— 9:55 P.M.— and added that both moon and sun were in Pisces with Libra rising, though she had no idea what that meant.
[…] On the birth certificate, Edward James Hughes, an author, from Court Green, North Tawton, Devon, is registered as the father of the newborn. However, it was David Wevill who gave the child his surname: thus, she was both men’s daughter, and neither’s. The given names, chosen by Assia and reflecting her sense of drama, pass on the mother’s dreams of grandeur to the daughter: Alexandra, after the last tsarina, the German-born wife of Nicholas II, and Tatiana, after Pushkin’s romantic heroine. […] Long aware of her mother’s terminal cancer, Assia added her name [Elise] to the baby’s.
[…] Olwyn [Hughes] maintains that Ted was happy to take the child on, although Assia had told her that she did not know who the father was. […] Assia made a point of whispering that Ted was the father.
[…] Ted went ahead and ordered one [horoscope] for Shura. The astrologer foresaw delicate health in childhood, but predicted that Shura would grow to be handsome, pretty, fair-skinned, with abundant artistic talent, but not too much emotion, too much acting out, laziness and willingness to manipulate others for services rather than just getting on with the job herself. In many ways, it seemed as if Assia’s personality was imprinted in her daughter so deeply that they were inseparable. […] Hughes’s informed his friend of Shura’s horoscope, but did not comment on the ill omens in it, the astrologer having predicted: “There would also be severe loss in this person’s life— deaths, accidents, etc. in the family.”
— Excerpt from Chapter Fifteen, “Birth” - London autumn 1964 - winter 1966 in “Lover of Unreason. Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love” by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev
The “Shura Wevill-Week”!
Another week, another theme… this week, I would like to dedicate to Ted Hughes’s daughter Shura Wevill.
Enjoy! :)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Shura Wevill!
You would have been 47 years old today!
(March 3, 1965 - March 23, 1969)
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We will have a “Shura-Week” in your honor next week! :)
Ted Hughes with hist sister Olwyn, and the teenage Nicholas, 1978
Scanned from Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Ted Hughes.
