Ted Hughes's love letters to mistress go to archive

The love letters of Sylvia Plath's husband, Ted Hughes,to his mistress have been acquired by Emory University in Atlanta.

The lettersprovide insight into a tumultuous time in the poet's personal life and join the Hughes literary archive at Emory's Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Theysurvived despiteHughes's instructions for his mistress, Assia Wevill, to destroy all of his personal writings to her.

The collection from the former British poet laureate includes 60 letters to Wevill, as well as notes, sketches, disjointed diary entries and photographs of her.

Their affair began in 1962, when Hughes was married to Plath, author of The Bell Jar and herself a poet. Plathtook her own life in 1963 at the age of 30 after discovering the affair.

The writings span the period in Hughes's life when he was writing Gaudete.

During that time, he and Wevill collaborated on a translation of Yehuda Amichai’s Selected Poems, published in 1968.

Wevill killed herself and their four-year-old daughter in 1969.

A few weeks after Wevill's death, Hughes wrote to her sister, Celia Chaikin, to say that their life together had been complicated by "old ghosts," but he added, "Assia was my true wife.''

Hughes died in 1998. Emory’s Hughes archive, obtained the year before his death, contains more than 6,000 volumes from his personal library and works.