To couple Ted Hughes’s name with feminism may seem surprising. As Nathalie Anderson says, ‘That a chill exists separating Ted Hughes from the feminist community . . . scarcely needs documenting.’ Largely, this arises from controversies concerning Sylvia Plath’s life and work. Hughes explains in a letter to his son Nicholas, ‘The incessant interference of the feminists and everything to do with your mother’s public fame made it impossible for me . . . everything I did was examined so minutely . . . I thought, let the feminists do what they like . . . let your mother’s Academic armies of support demolish me’ (LTH 712–13).

Despite the tensions between them, feminism and Ted Hughes share powerful concerns about relationships between men and women. Both explore the politics and negotiations — particularly domestic — of how men and women live together. Through a male view and sensibility, Hughes explores ‘feminist ideas without labelling them as such’. He is interested in female creativity, though this is rooted in assumptions about naturalness as well as archetypal masculine fears of women. I want to pick my way through all of this to explore what a sympathetic feminist reading of Hughes’s poems reveals.