Winner of the 2025 Lewis P. Simpson Award

In Lives Revised, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick engages the entangled life stories of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath to recover details, nuances, and perspectives excluded from previous biographies. Based on extensive archival work at the British Library and Emory University, as well as unpublished materials in private hands, Goodspeed-Chadwick considers how biographical storylines are constructed, reconceived, and dismantled across decades of research and interpretation. Her work plumbs the practical challenges and interpretive possibilities of biographies that engage with difficult subjects such as Wevill, Hughes, and Plath, particularly given the personal traumas, tragic ends, and competing legacies involved.

Drawing on documents and recordings only recently made available to researchers, Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath recovers previously inaccessible accounts about its subjects, contextualizes them within the critical traditions of feminism and trauma studies, and asks readers and scholars to rethink previous conclusions about three complex figures in literary and cultural history.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick is Chancellor's Professor of English, affiliate faculty member in women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and director of the Office of Student Research at Indiana University Columbus. She is the author of Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination and coeditor, with Peter K. Steinberg, of The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill.