But it is also present in the acknowledgement he makes to Richard Hooper, the lawyer responsible for changes to copyright law in 2014.

The fallout makes itself felt only in his subtitle, ‘The Unauthorised Life’, which, he pretends, refers to the unconventional way Hughes lived his life. Initially, this meant he had the advantage of seeing the unrestricted sections of Hughes’s intermittent journal as well as unpublished drafts. At its heart is Ted Hughes the sexual sadist.Īt one stage, Bate had the cooperation and confidence of the Hughes estate - an arrangement whose collapse he never discusses. It is also badly written, insensitive to the poetry, analytically inspissated, unerringly mistaken in its judgments, and incompetently narrated. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work…’ His biography is scurrilous. He piously tells us at the end of his ‘Prologue’ that ‘the cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected.

Jonathan Bate informs us that over a period of five years he has read and taken notes on nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts. In Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera says: ‘Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.’ In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm says: ‘The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.’ She also shrewdly remarks on the ‘mantle of judiciousness’ that biographers are forced to deploy.

Ted hughes by jonathan bate