Assia Wevill (May 15, 1927 – March 23, 1969) was a German-born woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Mandate Palestine, then later the United Kingdom, where she had a relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes.

She killed herself and her four-year-old daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed "Shura") in a fashion similar to that of Sylvia Plath, well-known writer and Hughes's first wife, who six years earlier had also committed suicide, by use of a gas oven.

Early life of Assia Wevill

Assia Gutmann was the daughter of a Jewish physician of Russian origin, Dr. Lonya Gutmann, and a German Lutheran mother, Elizabetha (née Gaedeke). She spent most of her youth in Tel Aviv. Cited by friends and family as a free-spirited young woman, she would go out to dance at the British soldiers' club, where she met Sergeant John Steel, who became her first husband and with whom she moved to London in 1946.

According to her biographers, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, "she had entered an essentially loveless marriage with an Englishman at the age of 20 – largely to enable her family to emigrate to England. The couple later emigrated to Canada, where Assia enrolled in the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and met her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsey.

In 1956, on a ship to London, she met the 21-year-old poet David Wevill. They began an affair, and Assia divorced Lipsey; she married Wevill in 1960.

Career

Wevill was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and was linguistically gifted. She had a successful career in advertising and was an aspiring poet who published, under her maiden name Assia Gutmann, an English translation of the work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Ted Hughes

In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat in Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London to Assia and David Wevill, and took up residence at North Tawton, Devon. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. He later wrote:

We didn't find her - she found us.
She sniffed us out...
She sat there...
Slightly filthy with erotic mystery...
I saw the dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her, and I knew it.

Plath noted their chemistry. Soon afterward, Ted and Assia began an affair. At the time of Plath's suicide, Wevill was pregnant with Hughes's child, but she had an abortion soon after Plath's death. The actual relationship, who instigated it, and its circumstances have been hotly debated for many years.

After Plath's suicide, Hughes moved Wevill into Court Green (the North Tawton, Devon home he had bought with Plath), where Wevill helped to care for Hughes's and Plath's two children, Frieda and Nicholas.

Wevill was reportedly haunted by Plath's memory; she even began using things that had once belonged to Plath. In a biography of Wevill, Lover of Unreason, the authors maintain that she used Plath's items not out of obsession, but rather for the sake of practicality, as she was maintaining a household for Hughes and his children.

On 3 March 1965 at age 37, Wevill gave birth to Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed "Shura", while still married to David Wevill.

Ostracized by her lover's friends and family, and eclipsed by the figure of Plath in public life, Wevill became anxious and suspicious of Hughes's infidelity, which was real enough. He began affairs with Brenda Hedden, a married acquaintance who frequented their home, and Carol Orchard, a nurse 20 years his junior, whom he married in 1970.

Wevill's relationship with Hughes was also fraught with complexities, as shown by a collection of his letters to her that have been acquired by Emory University. She was continually distraught at his seeming reluctance to commit to marrying and setting up a home with her, while treating her as a "housekeeper". Most of Hughes's friends indicate that while he never publicly claimed Shura as his daughter, his sister Olwyn said he did believe the child was his.

In October 2015 the BBC Two major documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes's life and work and included an examination of the part played by Wevill.

Death

On 23 March 1969, Wevill gassed herself and four-year-old Shura in their London home. She had sealed the kitchen door and window, taken and given to Shura sleeping pills dissolved in a glass of water, and turned on the gas stove. She and Shura were found lying together on a mattress in the kitchen.

Legacy

In advertising

Wevill composed the 90-second "Sea Witches" advertisement, for a ladies' hair-dye product, for both television and cinemas, called a "breakthrough in type" and a "huge success" by her biographers Koren and Negev, that was "applauded in theaters". The advert can be viewed in some classic ad compilations or sometimes as an online posting.

In literature

• Ted Hughes's volume of poetry Crow (1970) was dedicated to the memory of Assia and Shura.

• His poem "Folktale" deals with his relationship with Assia:
  She wanted the silent heraldry
  Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
  He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
  With its polythene bag full of ashes.

• Hughes published half a dozen poems he had written for Assia, which were hidden among the 240 poems in New Selected Poems (1989).

• In "The Error." he wrote:
  When her grave opened its ugly mouth
  why didn't you just fly,
  Why did you kneel down at the grave's edge
   to be identified accused and convicted?

• In "The Descent", he wrote:
  your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry,
  Took your daughter from you. She was stripped from you,
  The last raiment
  Clinging round your neck, the sole remnant
  Between you and the bed
  In the underworld

• Wevill appears as "Helen" in Fay Weldon's novel Down Among the Women.

In film

• In the feature film Sylvia (2003), Wevill is portrayed by Amira Casar.

Wikipedia

Ted Hughes revealed as a domestic tyrant who laid down law to mistress

By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent - Telegraph.co.uk

September 9, 2006

The poet Ted Hughes, the lynchpin of the 20th century's most tragic literary triangle, was such a domestic tyrant that he issued his mistress with two pages of typed instructions on how to manage his house and children and even dictated what time she should get up.

The revelation is contained in the first biography of Assia Wevill, Hughes's mistress for six years, which is serialised in The Daily Telegraph from today.

Wevill, 42, gassed herself with Shura, her four-year-old daughter by Hughes, in 1969 after discovering that he was having an affair. It was an eery re-enactment of the suicide six years earlier of the American poet Sylvia Plath — the wife Hughes abandoned after starting an affair with Wevill.

Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, the Israeli authors of A Lover of Unreason: the life and tragic death of Assia Wevill also disclose that Hughes and Wevill — a German-born Jew and a stunning beauty — started sharing Plath's bed in the London flat where she died within two days of her suicide.

Wevill, almost certainly unknown to Plath, was already pregnant by the man who was later to become Poet Laureate. Within six weeks, she was using the same bed to recover from an abortion.

The domestic instructions, described as a "Draft Constitution", were probably written in 1967 when Wevill and Hughes were living in Devon with Frieda and Nicholas, the poet's children by Plath.

In them, Hughes wrote that she was forbidden from staying in bed after 8am, from wearing her dressing-gown around the house and from taking a nap. She had to play with the children for at least an hour a day, teach them German and introduce each week at least one meal with "a recipe we have never had before". Hughes was exempt from cooking "except in emergencies".

Koren and Negev say that the poet and his family virtually airbrushed Wevill from history.

The authors talked to more than 70 friends and acquaintances of Wevill, including her three husbands, and unearthed a mass of personal documents such as her diaries, as well a heart-rending suicide note to her father.

Negev said yesterday that Hughes had initiated the affair, though, in one diary entry Wevill blames the ghost of Plath for making her suicidal. Negev said: "It was loving Ted that cost Assia her life."

'I'm going to seduce Ted Hughes'

By Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev - Telegraph.co.uk

September 9, 2006

Everyone who knew Assia Wevill remembers her vivid physical presence. The novelist William Trevor, who used to work alongside her in a London advertising agency, says she had something of Sophia Loren in her looks. David Ross, another friend, recalls a strong likeness to Elizabeth Taylor.

Ben Sonnenberg, the publisher of a literary journal, was impressed by Assia's "feral beauty, feral eyes, feral touch and feral movements. There was a feral purr in her voice and something feral in the arrangement of her hair. What a seductive animal," he recalls.

In the Sixties, she also stood out for her classical elegance – she shopped at Harrods rather than Carnaby Street – and for her immaculate upper-class English accent.

She had spent her early years in Germany, until the persecution of Jews forced her family to flee to Palestine, and had entered an essentially loveless marriage with an Englishman at the age of 20 – largely to enable her family to emigrate to England.

But, by 1962, Assia had reinvented herself as a copywriter at a large ad agency, was happily married to her third husband – the promising poet, David Wevill – and hunting for a new flat in London.

The flat they found belonged to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who were renting it out while they attempted to give their marriage another lease of life in the Devon countryside. However, the relationship between the two poets had become increasingly strained since the birth of their second child, Nicholas, in January.

After the harsh winter of 1962, they decided to invite several couples down to Court Green, their home in Devon. Apparently they did not have many close friends, for among their few guests that spring were the new tenants of their London flat: the Wevills.

Assia was ecstatic about the visit and shared her enthusiasm with her colleagues.

"She said in her rich deep voice, her green eyes challenging one to protest – 'I'm going to seduce Ted!' " recalls her boss, Angela Landels, who took it with a pinch of salt and simply muttered, "I don't care what you do, as long as you come back on Monday in a better mood."

The first day-and-a-half of the visit passed smoothly enough. "On Sunday morning, we got up late and hung about until lunch," says David Wevill. "Assia was in the kitchen making a salad, and Ted was with her. Sylvia and I were sitting outside chatting.

"We could hear Assia and Ted's muffled voices, and suddenly Sylvia went very still. She touched me on the knee and said, 'I'll be back.' She jumped from her chair and ran into the kitchen as if she remembered that she had left some fire burning."

David waited, but Sylvia did not return, and at lunch she was very quiet, "as if a door had slammed down on her". He supposed that their hostess had had enough of company, or else that she'd had a quarrel with Ted.

After lunch, she drove the Wevills to the railway station, with Ted beside her in the passenger seat. "She was very nervous, clashed the gears, and was on edge," says David.

"When we were alone in the cabin, I said to Assia, 'What happened to Sylvia? She changed completely, she was so friendly before.' And Assia answered, 'Ted kissed me in the kitchen, and Sylvia saw it.' "

David did not probe any further and Assia did not elaborate; nor did she indicate if she had reciprocated.

"It was the first time that something like that happened in our relationship, and it wasn't characteristic of her," says David. "I wasn't terribly alarmed. Mild flirtations can happen among friends, and I thought that Ted made the move since boys will be boys. I got the sense from Assia that the kiss surprised her, and that nothing would follow."

Whatever happened in the kitchen had no immediate effect on any member of the quartet. During the Wevills' visit, Sylvia had told Assia that she'd love to do tapestry and described a particular pattern that she'd once seen. Back in London, Assia found the pattern at Harrods, where she also bought thread in all the colours required for Sylvia to complete the tapestry.

So it was that Sylvia added needlework to her daily routine. Had she had any suspicion that Ted had been seriously attracted to Assia, it's unlikely that she would ever have touched her rival's present.

A sexual predator by nature, Ted found his first opportunity to stalk his prey five weeks later, when he had a couple of hours to kill in London after making a recording at the BBC. He hurried to the agency where Assia was working, only to discover that she wasn't available.

Undaunted, he scribbled a note and left it with the receptionist. And intimate though it was, Assia showed it to her friends. It read: "I have come to see you, despite all marriages."

Having always preferred rough waters to smooth sailing, she couldn't resist the thrill of responding – but she wanted to do it in striking, memorable fashion. From her office window, she noticed that a gardener was mowing the lawn below – and found her inspiration. She went down, picked up a single blade of the freshly cut grass, dipped it in Dior perfume and sent it to Ted.

Three days later, an envelope arrived at Assia's office: in it, the blade of London grass lay beside one from Devon.

Assia didn't hesitate to share Ted's romantic gesture with her husband David. Indeed, she flaunted it, in the hope perhaps of intensifying his desire or provoking his jealousy. David, however, remained his soft, loving and inert self.

On July 9, Sylvia had a phone call in Devon that changed everything: the voice on the other end appeared to be a woman pretending to be a man – and she was asking for Ted. In a fury, Sylvia ripped the cord of the phone out of the wall and then raced to the bedroom.

Ted ran after her. The door to the bedroom slammed shut and, for several hours, they stayed in their room while Sylvia's mother tried to calm her two grandchildren. Later, Sylvia built a bonfire in the yard and consigned Ted's letters and manuscripts to the flames. From that day on, she stopped working on Assia's tapestry.

Ironically, it was her rage over the telephone call that enabled the barely budding romance to bloom: Ted fled from Devon to London and set himself up temporarily in a friend's spare room, telling him that he was leaving Sylvia and that he was in love.

Without each other's knowledge, both David and Assia made Nathaniel Tarn – an anthropologist and poet – their confidant. Mesmerised by the unfolding drama, he recorded its progress almost daily.

After spending Wednesday, July 11 with Ted, Assia enthusiastically reported to Tarn that Ted was very virile and decisive: he did the kind of things that a man did and that David had stopped doing long ago. Two days later, on Friday, July 13, at lunchtime, Ted took Assia to a hotel, where he made love – as Tarn wrote in his diary – "so violent and animal, he ruptures her. A turns against him, goes quite cold."

Nor did Assia make any secret of Ted's ferocious lovemaking when it came to her office friends. She told Edward Lucie-Smith: "You know, in bed, he smells like a butcher."

At 8.30pm on that ominous Friday, Assia phoned her husband and told him she'd be late because she had gone to see Ted off at Waterloo station. For once, David's placid nature seemed to give way: armed with a knife, he hurried to the station – but failed to locate his rival.

Back home, his wrath battling with despair, he threw a newly completed poetry manuscript into the bin and then swallowed 20 or 30 pink Seconal sleeping pills. Finally, gripping a silver-handled Burmese knife with which he hoped to end his misery once he found the necessary courage, he lay down on the sofa.

Assia arrived after midnight and found him "lying so sweetly, so young (such contrast to fierce H). In bed". On the way to the hospital in an ambulance, while David lay semi-conscious on a stretcher, she was ruthless enough to announce that Hughes had raped her.

David's stomach was pumped and, all night, Assia walked him around the hospital corridors to keep him awake. After a taxi took them home that Sunday evening, he composed a short note to his rival: "If you come near my wife again, I'll kill you."

But the affair continued – though Ted was now returning to Devon almost weekly to see his wife and children.

Assia usually met her lover during extended lunchbreaks – and their love-nest was sometimes a 1950 white Ford van, lent to Ted by a friend. Her colleagues covered for her by saying that she had just popped to the loo or was attending to urgent business.

The two couples were drifting with the events; neither was ready to take the rudder and steer in a definite direction. Shuttling between Devon and London and moving between Sylvia and Assia, Hughes refused, or was unable, to make a firm commitment to either woman. As for Assia, she was torn between pity for her husband and infatuation with her lover. And although David found himself cast as the cuckolded husband, he remained affectionate and hoped that her passion would fade.

It was three months before Plath found out that the lovers had managed to have a secret 10-day escapade together in Spain and, when she did, she was outraged. David Wevill, however, never suspected a thing (and was incredulous when told 40 years later).

Back in Devon, Sylvia and Ted had a bitter row. Her letters speak of a "ghastly week", when he finally admitted to leading a secret love life in London and told her that she bored and stifled him. For a long time, he said, he had been looking for a chance to free himself.

Although he denied that he was planning a future with Assia, Sylvia Plath was certain that after she divorced him, he would soon marry his mistress, whom she never mentioned by name, preferring to label her "the bitch", for example, or the "barren woman".

In matters of the heart, Assia was not an initiator; she was a responder. Certainly, in that emotionally turbulent October, she was not prepared to force the issue of divorce from David or remarriage – not when she suspected that Ted was less than keen on the idea of marrying. And if she separated from David, she feared that Ted might eventually desert her.

David was not forcing any issues, either: he continued to turn a blind eye to the affair as he strove ardently to please and appease Assia.

At the beginning of December, Sylvia Plath moved to London with the children. She paid the rent for a year in advance for a flat in Fitzroy Road, where Hughes would arrive to see his children every Thursday morning.

Evidently, she was having second thoughts. On Thursday, February 7, she told Ted that she did not want a divorce at all: that "the whole crazy divorce business was a bluff".

But by then, Ted and Assia were no longer making a secret of their affair; indeed, people saw them together so often that it was assumed they were actually living together. And Assia was carrying Ted Hughes's child.

On Monday, February 11, 1963, Dr John Horder examined the body of his former patient, Sylvia Plath. He estimated that she had been dead for about six hours.

She had gassed herself in the kitchen, while her children were asleep upstairs.

The only close friends of hers whose phone number he possessed were Gerry and Jillian Becker; but Jillian did not have Ted's number. She called Suzette Macedo – but she, too, had no idea of Ted's whereabouts. So Suzette phoned Assia. Thus it was the mistress who had the grim task of notifying Ted Hughes.

At work, Assia also spread the news. "Something terrible has happened: Sylvia has killed herself," she announced, stepping into art director Julia Matcham's office.

Assuming that Assia must be overwhelmed with guilt, Julia sympathised: "Oh, you must feel awful."

Assia's eyes opened wide. "Why should I? It was nothing to do with me."

Ted Hughes immediately moved into the flat where his wife had lived and died, to tend to their small children Frieda and Nicholas. Two days later, Lucas Myers, an American friend, was passing through London and paid a condolence visit. Assia, feeling nauseous, was resting in Sylvia's room upstairs; apparently, Sylvia's suicide had not made the illicit lovers dive underground.

Myers stayed in the flat for a few hours. "Not much was said. Someone asked Ted to sing Waltzing Matilda, and he did. It was like a wake without alcohol," he recalls.

Since the rent had been paid a year in advance, Ted decided to stay in Plath's flat. That same week, David Wevill was urgently called to Ottawa, where his mother was terminally ill. Assia, meanwhile, continued to spend her nights in their Highbury flat, offering her husband long-distance support while visiting Ted and his children after work.

If there were any misgivings about her presence in Sylvia Plath's flat, she and Ted paid no notice. The children clung to any feminine figure, and Frieda expressed her delight that "Daddy's back".

Free to pry around, Assia was mesmerised by Sylvia's manuscript of Ariel poems and, though they vilified and attacked the lovers, she found them "most incredible" and flattered herself that she was the tragic muse.

Opening a maroon-backed ledger, she read Sylvia Plath's last journal, ending three days before the suicide. Surprised to learn "that the marriage was much dryer" than Ted had described it to her, she was shocked by the extent of Sylvia's hostility towards her. Next, she read the manuscript of Sylvia Plath's second novel, in which she easily identified herself and David, and was disgusted by Sylvia's portrayal of her as an "icy, barren woman".

Assia hoped that Ted would destroy it all; whether he followed her wishes or not, the fact remains that the novel was never found. As for the journal, Ted Hughes later admitted that he destroyed it because he did not want his children ever to read it. Assia's account of Sylvia's diary and her unfinished novel is the only surviving testimony on their content.

It was inevitable that Sylvia Plath's friends would point the finger at the adulterer and his mistress – but Assia refused to express remorse. Instead, she blamed Sylvia for killing herself deliberately in order to destroy her and Ted's happiness, complaining: "It was very bad luck that the love affair was besmirched by this unfortunate event."

Realising that a nanny cannot replace a mother, Ted now implored Assia to come and live with him, and she consented – while making it clear that her move was temporary. As she settled in her rival's flat, she established herself as the lady of the house by showing the door to Sylvia's friends, who were constantly around.

Although she raved about Ted's charity, energy, love and genius, Assia was privately alarmed by his voracious sexual appetite, his superstitions about marriage and his black moods. She resented his failure to share his work with her – unlike David, who had always made her feel that she was participating in his writing.

In the conspiracy of silence shared by all, her presence in the flat was kept a secret from Sylvia's mother, who was led to believe that the only feminine presence there was the nanny. Another secret kept from Mrs Plath was Assia's pregnancy.

There was no question about it being Ted's child, since there had been no sex between the Wevills for months. But Ted wanted no more children and, although Assia enjoyed the company of Frieda and her brother Nicholas, she abhorred the idea of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing.

"I had to go and see a succession of Harley Street bastards," Assia confided in her friend Jannice Porter, a nurse. She finally found an old Polish doctor in Maida Vale, who was kind and human. "Could you come to visit me on Friday or Saturday in the ghost house?" she pleaded with Jannice, asking her to burn the note.

Recovering in Sylvia's bed, Assia jotted down a series of rhetorical questions to Ted on a strip of paper, ending with: "Why are you relieved that I'm no longer pregnant? And when I'll go back home, will you be less sad?"

After David returned to London, it became clear that matters could not continue as they were. The Wevills agreed on a six-month separation – a common panacea at the time.

On May 15, 1963, back in Sylvia's flat, Assia turned 36 – but felt 100 years old. While she had been shuttling between the two men, she had been in control; now she felt lost. "I'm immersed now in the Hughes's monumentality, hers and his," she wrote in her diary. "The weak mistress, forever in the burning shadows of their mysterious seven years."

She mourned her "third and sweetest marriage… What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me… to this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night."

During most of May, Assia was bedridden with an excruciating bout of chronic cystitis. "There's a bruise on my left bosom. Ted inspects it with pleasure," she wrote in her diary. She put on make-up but soon her face was teary and streaked with mascara and she felt that her sickness made her "a total loss".

"If we can't make love properly again, I'd just as soon not live," she wrote. Her illness removed whatever self-esteem she had – "I have no will, no talent, a slight decorative intelligence and cystitis. Not enough vanity. No husband."

She shuddered at the possibility of rotting slowly on Sylvia's bed – "not this one – the cost is too high" – and consoled herself that, until the end of the month, she still had her own flat. She would go there, she confided to her journal, lock herself in and swallow the 25 sleeping pills that she had accumulated, and end her misery.

But, as she recovered, she regained her spirits and set out to devour life.

Since marrying at 20, Assia had lived only as one of a pair, but she easily added the role of stepmother to that of spouse. "I kissed Nick's neck over and over again. It kills me when he gurgles with it," she wrote. "Fantastic, the way children (not even my own) have finally surrounded me. The children I like, very much. I shall like them even better, I think, when they are a little older."

Life eventually assumed quasi-normality in the household. Assia's observations of Ted, recorded in her diary, offer a rare, first-hand account of him at work: he would sit sideways, cross-legged, against Sylvia's black desk that was too small for him, with a sandwich in one hand and a pen in another.

"His nostrils flared, his hair feathery, and leaping forward like a peacock's back train in reverse, swaying a little as he writes. Rather like a great beast, looking over an enormous feast, dazzled and confused by the variety."

Gazing intently at Ted's face, she was impressed by his square chin, which seemed to her to account for an eighth of his total weight. She could watch him for hours on end and noted that, even physically, Ted consisted of at least four different men.

His high profile, discounting the deeply set eyes, was very similar to an etching they had of Holbein's Henry VIII. The left-hand side of his face seemed much younger and more handsome than the rest, and en face, with his eyes fully focused, "one loses track and is either dazzled or dismayed. His mouth is grim – it's a sand ditch."

He worked with absolute concentration, in wild fever, like a man possessed, completely immune to all noises. "He's almost incapable of performing one word wrong," she wrote.

When Hughes was angry, she observed, his face turned black and the amorous impact of his eyes disappeared. His most destructive black moods surfaced when he was suffering from writer's block. "I hated him all night. Couldn't bear his arm under my head. Pretended it was a wooden bar," she recorded.

Both Assia and Ted were also busy with the literary work of their spouses. He was sending Sylvia Plath's poems for publication and editing them into a book; Assia was acting as David's literary agent. Ted was reluctant to speak to her about Sylvia but, wrote Assia, "Sylvia [is] growing in him, enormous, magnificent. I shrinking daily, both nibble at me. They eat me."

She increasingly doubted the permanence of Ted's commitment to her. In her view, Sylvia would remain his precious wife, while she was cast for ever in the role of mistress. "At the forefront is Sylvia, and after that, the Grand Scheme, the Genius, the children, and the fixity of the sun, the millions of hawks and fishes and owls, and nightshade that I neither see nor hear."

A horrifying thought began to creep in: that she was inviting Sylvia's doom on herself. She confided in her diary: "She had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have. I should never have looked into Pandora's box, and now that I have, I am forced to wear her love-widow's sacking, without any of her compensations.

"What, in five years' time, will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I? How much time have I been given? How much time has run out? What have I done with it? Have I used myself to the hilt already? Am I enough for him? AM I ENOUGH FOR HIM?"

One night, Ted dreamt that Sylvia's hair had turned white and that he had shot a cat that they had once had in Boston, but it refused to die. He woke in wild hysteria, and poured out the details to Assia. His nightmares of that time infiltrated his poetry, in which he described three "dream-meetings" with Sylvia.

Only a few months earlier, when Ted was married to Sylvia, Assia had been the one who hit his imagination by stealth, and it now dawned on her: "We are in perfect reversal, it's Sylvia who's hit it again, and will remain there until he's middle-aged, when she'll be relieved by a very young girl…

"T is a long night of nightmares. Whatever the consequences for me, T is unconcerned. After I leave him, he'll move from one woman to woman."

Meanwhile, they often exploded into bickering quarrels and their good days were rare. "We've lived in peace for five days now, the longest (it seems) stretch since Sylvia died," Assia noted on June 12, 1963.

Ted constantly changed his mind about where he wanted to live, and Assia worried that he might want to buy a house near his parents in Yorkshire. "The North terrifies me. Big Boulder smashing me. I feel devoid of substance, of self," she wrote.

She envisioned a cold stone house: "hands chapped and red, tired, children chattering like monkeys, Ted locked in a small icy room, coming out three times a day, foraging for food like a bear. Great monumental disregards. We all look unkempt, unkemptable. Patronising visitors come from London. I'm their mother. The thought of ever marrying him utterly repugnant. Let him continue to be her God."

Nevertheless, she joined Ted on his house-hunting trips.

Like Sylvia, she found it difficult to adjust to his close-knit Yorkshire family and their puritanical views: Ted's parents were dismayed by their son's relationship with a thrice-married woman, fearing that it had ruined his reputation and lost him any chance of a knighthood.

When Assia and Ted stayed with them, they were put in separate bedrooms for the sake of decency. Bringing coffee to his room in the morning, Assia could not stop thinking that "they [Ted and Sylvia] probably slept in the room".

One week, she and Ted drove to Court Green in Devon to pick up some items – her first visit since the weekend that had ignited the affair a year earlier.

"Assia was stunningly beautiful, and my husband and I were overawed," recalls Elizabeth Sigmund, who was watching over the house and had known Sylvia well.

When Assia turned to Ted and asked to see the house, Ted, silent and detached, made no move. Elizabeth got up and led the way. Outside Sylvia's study, Assia turned to her and asked, "Don't you feel like a traitor?" Elizabeth broke down in tears and rushed downstairs, to find Ted rolling a carpet, also weeping.

Left alone on the first floor, Assia delved into "the Holy Study", as she ironically called it, and "the God's bedroom" – and took out Sylvia's clothes, also foraging through drawers full of combs and ribbons and brushes and miscellaneous half-discarded things. She felt far from victorious: "It was the funeral all over again. DAW [David Anthony Wevill] and mine funeral. And theirs," she wrote in her diary.

She went downstairs, and, according to Elizabeth, asked, "Do you think Ted and I can be happy together?"

Elizabeth pointed at Ted, worn and shrunken, and said: "Look at him. Sylvia's spirit will always stand between you."

This is an edited extract from 'A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill', by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev (Robson Books). The book is available for £18 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112.