LONDON: Ownership of Sylvia Plath from the beginning of her marriage to fellow poets Ted Hughes, including love letters and their wedding rings, sold for more than £ 770,000 ($ 1.1 million) at auction on Wednesday.
Online sales 55 lots from their daughter’s personal collection Frieda Hughes opened on July 9 at Sotheby’s in London and raised more than three estimates.
The prominent item is the tarot card deck, which reflects the interest of couples in esoterics, which are sold more than 25 estimates of prices at £ 151,200.
Tarot cards are often used to tell good luck and have associations with occult.
The Tarot de Marseille card tends to be a deck given by Hughes on a birthday to 24th in 1956.
“We celebrated my birthday yesterday: [Ted] gave me a beautiful tarot package and a respectable poem with it,” Plath wrote.
For his mother Aurelia.
The card has been estimated to sell up to £ 6,000.
Plath makes figurative making tarot in his poetry, including “The Hanging Man”.
The pair gold wedding ring was sold for £ 27.720, while four love letters typed in Hughes were sold for £ 30,240.
Sales included a total of 16 letters from the immediate after marriage of the 1956 pair, when Plath still studied at Cambridge and Hughes worked in London.
According to Sotheby, they are the only letter that survives.
In one, Plath described being “welded not miserable” to his new husband and missed him: “Have never been in my life, I have separated from one I love that is very immeasurable more than myself; God, let me immediately with you.” Plah looked forward to “the glowing grail” of their reunion, once he finished his last test in June 1957.
“I will never leave your side a day in my life after the test …
I think if something happens to you, I will really kill Self, “he wrote.
The letters contained the draft poem, and criticism from Hughes’s work, which then worked on the collection of breakthroughs “The Hawk in the Rain”.
“My husband is genius,” he wrote.
This sale also includes a family album with 192 photos of their couples and children – Frieda and his sister Nicholas – with handwriting information by Plath.
It sells for £ 44,100.
“This auction is really about the happiest and most dynamic part of my parents’ relationship when they work best together and are still very passionate in love and support each other,” Frieda Hughes, 61, who is a poet and painter, said before sale.
“If you read my mother’s letter to my father, their passion and their love is extraordinary.
I’m not sure everyone finds love like that for the rest of them.” Plath and Hughes, who later became the poet Poas Britain, remained two of the most famous post-warfishes in English literature.
Hughes silent about his first wife’s death until 1998 when he published a collection of famous verses of “birthday letters”.
He died of cancer only a few months later, 68 years old.
In 2010, a poem that was previously invisible by Hughes was published where he described the dark days before Suicide Plah in February 1963, as long as one of the coldest British winter.
Suffering from depression, dishes breathe from the gas oven, after sealing the kitchen door carefully to protect Frieda and Nicholas, who were sleeping in the nearest room.
He recorded his struggle with depression since his teenagery in the autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar”.
Nicholas Hughes suicide in March 2009.
He also suffered from depression, according to his sister.