Hughes breaks silence on Plath suicide

One of Britain's best known poets, Ted Hughes, has broken a thirty-five year silence about the suicide of his first wife, the distinguished American poet, Sylvia Plath.

Many feminists and admirers of Plath hold Hughes responsible for his wife's suicide in 1963, accusing him of abandoning her for another woman at a time when she was emotionally unstable.

Hughes has now published a collection of poems - the Birthday Letters - which give his version of what has come to be regarded as one of the most tragic literary love stories of the century.

Critics say the work shows Hughes as a man deeply in love and tortured by his wife's unstable nature, not an indifferent betrayer as he has often been depicted.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service