A LOVER OF UNREASON: THE LIFE AND TRAGIC DEATH OF ASSIA WEVILL

Book ID/图书代码： 08900006B01928

English Summary/英文概要： ’Assia was my true wife, and the best friend I ever had’, wrote a heart-broken Ted Hughes, after Assia Wevill surrendered her life and that of their four-year old daughter to the fumes from the gas oven in her London flat, in March 1969 six years after Sylvia Plath had suffered a similiar fate. Diva, she-devil, enchantress, muse, Lillith, Jezebel - the exquisitely beautiful Assia Wevill inspired or provoked many epithets in the course of three marriages and in pursuit of a destiny that took her from dark pre-war Berlin, to Palestine during the British Mandate and then to London in the swinging ’Sixties. In the end, none would prove to be more fitting than the epithet- and epitaph- she chose for herself: ’Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile’. The story of the ultimately tragic failure in the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, twentieth-century poetry’s most celebrated literary couple, has always been related from one of two conflicting points of view: hers or his. Missing for more than four decades had been a third, equally relevant and no less fascinating perspective: that of Ted Hughes’s mistress, Assia Wevill. "The Lover of Unreason", the first biography of Assia Wevill, views afresh the Plath-Hughes relationship and marriage with a keen, revisionary eye, and at the same time, recounts the journey that shaped her life. Hers is a complex story, formed as it is by the pull of often contrary forces: fatal attraction and obsessive love, fidelity and adultery, cruelty and tenderness, dependence and rebellion, envy and self-sacrifice.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 1962年5月，愛西亞和她的第三任丈夫，加拿大詩人大衛．維薇爾受邀與普拉絲夫妻共度週末。就在那個週末，休斯與愛西亞陷入戀情。普拉絲很快發現這段不倫之戀，命令丈夫搬出去。休斯拒絕放棄他的情婦，並且永遠地搬至倫敦居住。兩個月後，普拉絲獨自帶了小孩也落腳倫敦，身無分文且生活困頓的她，重拾筆桿寫作藉以賺取微薄薪資。普拉絲原本以為丈夫將回心轉意與她重拾舊愛，但在得知第三者懷了丈夫的孩子之後，希薇亞在一九六三年二月十一日以瓦斯自盡。
愛西亞和休斯戀情並未因此而結束。1965年，兩人的女兒夏拉誕生，十個月後，愛西亞離開大衛，與泰德赴愛爾蘭。愛西亞是個完美的伴侶：她寫詩，喜愛藝術，而且畫技優異，不過她沒有野心。兩人本想在愛爾蘭住五年，然而幾個月後，他們決定回德文郡照顧休斯體衰的母親。休斯的家人為這段醜聞關係感到沮喪，認為這曾結婚三次的高傲女人只會毀了兒子的聲譽。他們不願接納維薇爾，不和她說話、共桌。愛西亞和休斯雙親若發生任何爭吵，休斯總站在父母那邊。愛西亞突然醒悟，普拉絲的自殺永遠毀了她，而休斯絕對不會娶她…
坊間多是從普拉斯或是從休斯的觀點，來探討他們的婚姻悲劇，而這本是目前唯一以情婦愛西亞的觀點，揭露泰德．休斯兩樁悲劇收場的戀情。

Awards/获奖情况：Rights sold:
North American,UK,Greek,Hebrew,Polish

"Eye opening, utterly intriguing biography of the beautiful but troubled women who was one of Ted Hughes’s mistresses."---The Sunday Times, Culture, October 15, 2006

...One of the most wonderfully well-written and powerful literary biographies I have encountered. ---Roger Lewis, Mail on Sunday, October 15, 2006

About the Author/作者介绍： Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev are both distinguished literary journalists and authors, and have been researching Assia Wevill’s story for 15 years. In the course of their research they have unearthed a mass of personal documents, and interviewed all the key witnesses, most of them speaking here for the first time. Koren and Negev’s previous book, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, a dwarf family’s survival of the Holocaust was published in eight languages, and inspired two documentary films.

Format:HARDCOVER ILLUSTRATED

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：

原文第一章内容：暂无

手稿：暂无

大纲：有