Assia Wevill

Ostracized by her lover's friends and family, and eclipsed by the figure of Plath in public life, Assia became anxious and suspicious of Hughes's infidelity, which was real enough. Hughes began affairs with Brenda Hedden, a married acquaintance who frequented their home, and Carol Orchard, a nurse 20 years his junior, whom he would later marry in 1970. Assia's relationship with Hughes was also fraught with other complexities, as shown by a collection of his letters to her acquired by Emory University. She was continually distraught by his reluctance to marry her and establish a home together, as well as his treatment of her as a "housekeeper". In his letter to Leonard Baskin on 16 July 1969, Hughes references Shura, his daughter with Wevill. He writes, "I have two nice children who make life a great pleasure.... I had a third, a little marvel, but she died with her mother."

On 23 March 1969, Assia killed herself and four-year-old Shura in their London home at 3 Okeover Manor, Clapham Common. She had first sealed the kitchen door and window, then dissolved sleeping pills in a glass of water, chased with whisky, and then turned on the gas supply to the stove without lighting it. She and Shura were found by the family's German au pair, Else Ludwig, lying together on a mattress in the kitchen.

After Plath's suicide, Hughes moved Assia into Court Green (the Devon home at North Tawton he had bought with Plath), where Assia helped care for Hughes's and Plath's two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Assia was reportedly haunted by Plath's memory; she even began using things that had once belonged to Plath. In their biography of Assia, Lover of Unreason, Koren and Negev maintain that she used Plath's items not from obsession, but for the sake of practicality since she was maintaining a household for Hughes and his children. On 3 March 1965, at age 37, Assia gave birth to Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura, while still married to David Wevill.

In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat in Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London, to Assia and David Wevill, and took up residence at North Tawton, Devon. Hughes was immediately struck with Assia, as she was with him. He later wrote:

In 1956, on a ship to London, she met the 21-year-old Canadian poet David Wevill. They began an affair and Assia divorced Lipsey; she married Wevill in 1960.

According to her biographers, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, "she had entered an essentially loveless marriage with an Englishman at the age of 20 – largely to enable her family to immigrate to England." The couple later immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where Assia enrolled at the University of British Columbia and met the man who would become her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsey. Assia and Steele divorced in 1949 and she married Lipsey in 1952.

Assia Gutmann was the daughter of a Jewish physician of Latvian origin, Lonya Gutmann, and a German Lutheran mother, Elisabeth "Lisa" (née Gaedeke). Her sister Celia was born on 22 September 1929. They escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and immigrated to Palestine, now Israel. She spent most of her youth in Tel Aviv. Described by friends and family as a free-spirited young woman, she would go out to dance at the British soldiers' club, where she met Sergeant John Steele, with whom she moved to London in 1946 and who became her first husband in 1947.

Assia Esther Wevill (née Gutmann; 15 May 1927 – 23 March 1969) was a German Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Palestine, via Italy, then later the United Kingdom, where she had an affair with the English poet Ted Hughes. While she was a successful advertising copywriter and a talented translator of poetry, she is mainly remembered in the context of her relationships with Sylvia Plath and Hughes.