The Guardian Reports the Death of Olwyn Hughes

For The Guardian, Jonathan Bate writes about the recent death of Ted Hughes's literary agent and sister, Olwyn Hughes. Bate is the author of the recent Ted Hughes biography, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life.

In a photograph of Ted Hughes from his youth, the poet is cradling a large mirror. It reflects his sister, Olwyn Hughes, holding a box camera: the combination of their images symbolises how, from the age of 35 until her death at the age of 87, she devoted herself to his service and then his memory.

Her life was changed by a letter she received in Paris in February 1963: “Dear Olwyn, On Monday morning, at about 6am, Sylvia gassed herself.” Later that year, she gave up the job and the city that she loved in order to help her younger brother bring up his children, three-year-old Frieda and one-year-old Nicholas, from his marriage to the poet Sylvia Plath. In Frieda’s earliest memories, the tall woman with the high thin nose and the often scolding manner was assumed to be a mother, not an aunt. During this period Olwyn translated a French novel, The Return by Michel Droit, which was published by Andre Deutsch.

Soon after moving to Court Green, the house in North Tawton, Devon, that Ted had shared with Sylvia, Olwyn found herself looking at the contract from the publishers Faber & Faber for a poetry collection that he had edited. In Paris she had worked for the Martonplay agency, so was familiar with contractual negotiations for film and stage work. She was aghast at the poor terms being offered to her brother.

Ted in turn was surprised to learn that contracts could actually be negotiated. Hitherto, simply grateful to be published, he had just signed whatever contract he was sent. So began Olwyn’s career as his agent. The novelist Jean Rhys happened to live nearby, so Olwyn took her on, too. She soon moved to London and acquired a few more clients, but the vast bulk of her time was devoted to the work of her brother and the posthumous literary life of her late sister-in-law. She earned a reputation as a fearsome, difficult gatekeeper and a tough negotiator.

Publishing expensive leather-bound limited editions of her brother’s works on her Rainbow Press proved profitable. But she was also careless over detail and made some bad mistakes, notably over the screen rights to Plath’s novel The Bell Jar – an inadvertently deleted clause led to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that engulfed Ted in the mid-1980s.

More at The Guardian.