In such circumstances readers will expect revelations, and Bate is candid about many elements. Bate also fell out with the estate (managed by Hughes’s widow, Carol) as he neared completion of his work, hence its subtitle. Previous biographers were guided by Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, but Bate mentions early on that she became “very angry” after reading a draft of an early chapter that discussed tensions among his upwardly mobile extended family. Near the beginning of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, Jonathan Bate reports that he frequently found himself asking, “How can someone so good be so bad?” The scale and range of Hughes’s work have become apparent since the publication of his Collected Poems and Selected Letters, but Bate has read more of his unpublished work than any other scholar in the fraught lead-up to this book’s publication.
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