Ted Hughes’s widow has attacked an unauthorised biography of the poet, claiming that the book is littered with errors.
Carol Hughes, who became the poet laureate’s second wife in 1970, issued a statement that described “errors of fact” in Sir Jonathan Bate’s book as “damaging and offensive”. She cited 18 mistakes spread over 16 pages that she had read, including a suggestion that she and her stepson had stopped for “a good lunch” while returning home with the poet’s body after his death in 1998.
Sir Jonathan, professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and a former Man Booker Prize judge, had obtained Mrs Hughes’s permission to write an authorised biography but had to retitle it when the pair fell out.
The biography, which was serialised in The Times, is titled Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Sir Jonathan did not respond to calls last night.
Mrs Hughes said: “The idea that Nicholas [Hughes’s son with Sylvia Plath] and I would be enjoying a ‘good lunch’ while Ted lay dead in the hearse outside is a slur suggesting utter disrespect, and one I consider to be in extremely poor taste.” She objected to a description of the deathbed scene, which mentioned the poet’s children but not her, even though she was present and slept in his hospital room for the last two nights of his life.
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She also disputed a description of Hughes’s funeral that read: “The family departed for a private cremation . . . leaving the mourners in the November rain. Court Green [the family home] was not reopened.”
Mrs Hughes’s solicitor said that the passage “falsely implies an insensitive lack of consideration or hospitality for the mourners” and that “family and friends were invited to return for a buffet after the cremation”.
Mrs Hughes objected to a passage speculating on how the poet might have responded to his son’s suicide. Sir Jonathan wrote: “It is a mercy that [Ted Hughes] did not have to endure this. It is the one thing that would have destroyed him.”
Hughes’s estate said that the biographer, who did not know the poet personally, was being presumptious.
Damon Parker, a lawyer for the Ted Hughes estate, said that Mrs Hughes had not read the biography but had been made aware of some of its content through serialisation and comments by friends and reviewers.