Word: husbandly
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Plath and Hughes were wed just four months after they met, and the marriage burned fast and hot. Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband (Viking; 361 pages) takes us inside the tight, intense feedback loop of two obsessive, competitive writers who read and critiqued each other's work fresh from the typewriter. In time, the intensity turned claustrophobic for Hughes. He began an affair with another woman, and the couple separated. But in the agonizing aftermath of their marriage, Plath found a new and devastatingly powerful voice, the voice of "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy" and the other towering, terrifying poems that would...
...clarify his side of the story and to some extent to exonerate him. It's an uphill battle. Plath could certainly be difficult, and unquestionably the presence of Hughes, a major poet in his own right, accelerated Plath's development as a writer. But nothing in Her Husband will settle the question of whether Hughes exacerbated or merely failed to stem the self-destructive urges that finished her. What's clear is that like Lucia Joyce, Plath was finally consumed by the dark star she orbited. But her story has a very different ending. Unlike Lucia, in death she eclipsed...
...before her grandson was born, Vargas Llosa reimagines 1844, the year of her death from typhoid at the age of 41. Tristan spends most of it traveling around southern France, pleading her vision of a cooperative future to small, mostly uncomprehending audiences. Years earlier she had fled her abusive husband, taking their small daughter Aline, Gauguin's mother. Tristan thinks back on the odyssey that then took her as far as Peru, where she went in hope of securing an inheritance from her late Peruvian father. The money was denied her, but Tristan was dauntless, the sort of woman...
Even in safer regions, older volunteers stare down tricky challenges. Feeling restless after her husband's death, microbiologist Bettylene Franzus volunteered in her Tennessee town but felt confined by the work. So she joined WorldTeach and now instructs Marshall Islands high schoolers in science. At 75, she's handling myriad problems, from logistical (her science books crumble in the salt air) to physical (the school has no janitor, so she swabs floors, sweeps coral dust and empties trash bins in her classroom) to intellectual (though she's a science instructor, her students' difficulty with English means she also teaches...
...Anne Bancroft's 1970 television special, Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man, which not only won him an Emmy but also introduced him to both its director and producer, Martin Charnin, who later offered him his first Broadway show, and his future writing partner, Bancroft's husband, Mel Brooks...