Assia Wevill Biography

Assia Wevill, pronounced “Ah-cee-ia.” (15 May 1927–23 March 1969).

Assia Wevill, thrice married, was the mistress of English Poet Ted Hughes, a malignant narcissist, well-known serial adulteress, and eventually became the murderer of she and Hughes’s four-year-old illegitimate daughter Alexandria “Shura” Hughes. Assia Wevill is long believed to have been instrumental in compelling Sylvia Plath to commit suicide when she visited Plath in her cold apartment in England, in February of 1963 obviously heavily pregnant, during the coldest winter there in 150 years while Plath was struggling to care for her two children alone.

Wevill told Plath she was pregnant with Hughes’s child and would deliver the baby, also telling Plath that he wanted to marry her. A lie. She left the meeting triumphant. Plath, despondent, then took her life sometime later, but left her children safely in another room, with wet towels in the door cracks, used to protect them from the gas from the stove where she would place her head and then die. Plath left bread and milk out for her two children, Frieda and Nicholas, in their room, knowing also that the Nanny would be coming to the house soon. The Nanny was late that morning by almost two hours. After Plath’s suicide, Assia Wevill arranged a late stage abortion so she could proceed with her plan to marry Hughes, who would have become her fourth husband. She was 34 at the time.

When Assia Wevill’s younger sister Celia met with Ted Hughes several weeks after Sylvia Plath’s suicide to settle various legal matters, in 1963, she asked him: “Why are you attracted to troubled women?” meaning not only Plath, but also her own sister. Hughes denied that he was attracted to “troubled women” and confessed he didn’t understand the question. Assia Wevill would then take her own life in a copycat suicide seven years later, in March of 1969, but she would also murder her daughter with Hughes. Assia Wevill had been married three times and would spend years unsuccessfully trying to coerce Hughes into marrying her, which he would refuse to do. After it became apparent Hughes would never marry her, Wevill murdered their child in a calculated and aggressive act of revenge, taking her own life as well.

While Plath has occasionally been criticized for taking her life and leaving her two children motherless, she did not murder her children but rather left out milk and bread for them. Assia Wevill, by contrast, murdered her child, the innocent daughter she had had with Ted Hughes as a result of a second pregnancy, which many believe only occurred as a second desperate bid for him to finally marry her. After Plath’s suicide in 1963, Wevill was known to go through Plath’s journals, reading them laughing about the content Plath had written in them, including and especially the writings detailing the affair Hughes had had with Assia Wevill. Hughes was either unaware or indifferent to these gross betrayals of his dead wife. Hughes also apparently allowed Wevill to go through Plath’s clothing, taking what she wanted and even taking possession of the contents of Sylvia Plath’s jewelry box and wearing Plath’s jewelry for several years.

Assia Wevill murdered Alexandria “Shura” Hughes, aged four, March 23, 1969, also taking her own life on that day.