#Sylvia Plath’s love letters to Ted Hughes up for sale at Sotheby’s

A stash of love letters sent from American poet Sylvia Plath to her British husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes is up for auction at Sotheby’s. Also up for grabs are the legendary literary couple’s wedding rings, as well as the family Bible, recipes and photo albums.

The 55-lot auction includes some of the most personal Plath items ever sold, according to Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s English literature and historical manuscripts specialist. The unprecedented items trace Plath’s creative development, her love for Hughes and her sense of humor.

“Here you have the beginning of this relationship when she is deeply, deeply in love. She’s wonderfully excited about their union and about the future,” Heaton told the Guardian. “But also you get such a strong sense of their literary collaboration and how they’re working together and thinking together.”

The 32 intimate letters — being sold by Frieda Hughes, the couple’s daughter, who represents the Plath estate — consist of 16 written to Hughes, all in October 1956, four months after their wedding, and the rest are missives sent to her in-laws, with the most recent dated 1961.

Plath, the writer behind such poems as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” took her own life in 1963 at age 30 by putting her head in a gas oven. Hughes, who served as poet laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his 1998 death, explored his relationship with Plath and his response to her suicide in his poetry collection “Birthday Letters.” Their son, Nicholas Hughes, died by suicide in 2009.

Plath and Hughes married in 1956, but their relationship was quite tumultuous and explosive. Many of her letters detail her separation from Hughes while she was studying at Cambridge.

“Darling, you’re the wildest loveliest piece of flesh walking,” she wrote in one letter. “If little girls scream, it is only in a kind of Bacchic ecstasy; the police are just jealous and want to convict such exceptional Samsonian excellence.”

“I love you and perish to be with you and lying in bed with you and kissing you all over … I love you teddy teddy teddy teddy and how I wish I could be with you … All my love ever, your own love wife, Sylvia,” she wrote in another impassioned letter.

Despite her longing, their being apart was supposedly good for their writing, and they would send each other their new works. Plath would often criticize his poems through her letters, sending feedback like “How about another word for ‘hideous’?” or “I don’t think ‘horrible void’ is the best you can do.”

The pain of separation, though, continued for months, and her letters continued to tell of her agony. “This year will set me deeper than ever in the dark secret well of my own fancies, dreams and visions; living with you will save me from being suffocated with no outlet,” she wrote.

In some of the letters, Plath encourages Hughes — who at the time was mostly unknown — to enter the prestigious Harper’s poetry contest. Hughes would go on to win the competition in 1957 with his collection “The Hawk in the Rain.”

The couple’s relationship broke down in 1963, just before Plath’s suicide. Although not featured in the auction, Plath wrote letters alleging that Hughes “beat me up physically” a couple of days before a miscarriage, “seems to want to kill me” and “told me openly he wished me dead.”

The auction will also feature a family photo album that documents their road trip across the US, depicting them fishing in Yellowstone Lake and meeting up with friends such as T.S. Eliot. The album spans from the period after their honeymoon to their final year in Devon, and is expected to sell for up to $69,000, according to the Sotheby’s listing.

Also for sale is a set of tarot cards given as a gift to Plath from Hughes, as well as an Egyptian figurine given to Plath by Hughes on their honeymoon.

Sotheby’s is auctioning a striking ink portrait drawn by Plath during the couple’s honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain, in addition to an embossed rolling pin and chopsticks that Hughes gifted to Plath. Recipe cards for fish chowder, cherry and cottage cheese cobbler, and carrot cake are also for sale.

Their wedding rings, which were “hurriedly purchased” before their June 1956 marriage in London just four months after first meeting, are expected to fetch between $8,000 and $11,000.

“We rushed about London, buying dear Ted shoes & trousers, two gold wedding rings (I never wanted an engagement ring) with the last of our money,” she wrote in her diary.

On the more humorous side`, one of the lots is a cartoon in which Plath depicts herself as a maid attacking a dinner guest with an ax.

Bidding opens next Friday and goes through July 21.