Amidst the frantic rush of the end-of-summer season—finishing syllabi and opening-week course assignments while her husband ushered their children into sneakers, Crocs, and the car for one final back-to-school outing—everything came to a sudden halt. Standing at the kitchen sink, watching the morning light filter through the holly bush outside the window, Van Duyne wept.
The outpouring of obituaries in major newspapers across the United States and abroad quickly cataloged an extraordinary life. Born on January 29, 1941, Morgan’s monumental list of accomplishments spanned 23 published books, the organization of the famed 1969 Miss America Pageant protest—where feminists famously crowned and sashed a live sheep on the Atlantic City Boardwalk—and the founding of the National Network of Rape Crisis Centers. Yet, despite these monumental contributions to the second wave of the feminist movement, only a handful of mainstream tributes acknowledged Morgan’s profound, complicated influence on the legacy of Sylvia Plath, a connection that in turn dramatically shaped Morgan’s own life and career. When tributes did mention it, they typically reduced this rich history to a single biographical footnote: Morgan’s incendiary 1972 poem "Arraignment," which famously opened with the lines: "How can I / accuse / Ted Hughes / of… the murder of Sylvia Plath?"
Even a cursory look at the history of "Arraignment" reveals how Morgan’s relationship with Plath’s work resisted simple categorization. Morgan originally included the poem in her 1972 poetry collection, Monster, but the published version was not what she intended for print. The original opening lines of the poem read simply: "I accuse / Ted Hughes / of… the murder of Sylvia Plath."
As Morgan detailed in a candid 1973 essay for the Feminist Art Journal, the conflict arose after the book’s galleys had already been printed. She was summoned to a tense meeting with Random House lawyers, who informed her that "Arraignment" had to be completely pulled or rewritten. The legal team argued that the poem as it stood accused Ted Hughes of raping and murdering his wife, thereby presenting undeniable grounds for a damaging libel suit.
Morgan’s response to the legal pressure was two-pronged. First, she clarified that she was not accusing Hughes of the literal, physical murder of his first wife, acknowledging that Plath had died by suicide on February 11, 1963. Instead, Morgan was arguing that through his extreme and well-documented censorship of Plath’s work after her death, Hughes had effectively murdered Plath’s artistic corpus and her radical politics. In "Arraignment," she used the word "murder" satirically, tapping into a long-established tradition of artistic hyperbole utilized by literary figures like Andrew Marvell, Jonathan Swift, and John Donne.
Second, during her extensive research into Plath’s life, Morgan had uncovered a series of letters written by Plath that explicitly described domestic abuse, including sexual abuse, perpetrated by Hughes. As Morgan wrote in the Feminist Art Journal, she had seen roughly twenty such letters, meaning her accusation of rape in the poem was backed directly by Plath’s own written words. In her essay, Morgan quoted a line from one of those recovered letters: "Why must the killing of me be so elaborate?" She remarked at the time that it was a "purely Plathian line."
Despite her sharp and insightful arguments, Morgan’s explanations meant little to the Random House attorneys. Like many literary legal teams of that era, they were acutely aware of Ted Hughes’s well-known propensity for utilizing aggressive litigation to shut down anyone attempting to challenge his tightly controlled version of Plath’s life and work.
Faced with this immovable wall, Morgan rewrote "Arraignment." She changed the direct, unyielding "I accuse / Ted Hughes" to the more circumspect "How can I / accuse / Ted Hughes"—a brilliant rhetorical maneuver that managed to contain her fierce outrage entirely within strategic line breaks and punctuation. By asking the reader on the page how she could possibly do this and get away with it, she managed to outmaneuver the legal constraints, allowing the second version of the poem to go to print.
It was a quintessential gesture from Morgan, a woman who once famously derided women’s attempts to organize alongside leftist men as "the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea." Yet, the compromise devastated her. She felt that Monster had been compromised and that her creative and political ethics—which for her were always inextricably linked—had been bruised. The ordeal literally made her physically ill; she later recalled in the Feminist Art Journal that she had to resort to gobbling Dramamine before every meeting with the Random House lawyers.
A dramatic reprieve, however, was already underway. When the original, uncensored version of "Arraignment" was published in the Feminist Art Journal, women around the world took matters into their own hands, printing and distributing pirated copies of Monster that restored the original text. These underground editions were striking: hot pink books adorned with a silver sticker emblazoned with Morgan’s face. Decades later, during a phone conversation, Morgan’s voice would break as she recalled "those women, all those wonderful women," and the profound way they rallied to support her.
The controversy surrounding "Arraignment" eventually inspired one of the most persistent mythologies in Plath scholarship: the widespread story that Ted Hughes stopped giving public poetry readings in America because women would relentlessly protest them by shouting "Arraignment" at the top of their lungs. As Plath scholar Janet Badia proved definitively in her foundational book, Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers, those protests never actually happened.
Instead, what happened was that the broader literary establishment went to great lengths to silence Morgan. Morgan herself recounted that the acclaimed author Doris Lessing called her at home to tell her to "knock it off" in no uncertain terms. Archival research later corroborated this heavy-handed suppression; a letter written by Ted Hughes’s sister, Olwyn Hughes, and housed at Emory University, explicitly details her efforts to enlist Lessing in the campaign to quiet Morgan. Hearing that account confirmed by Morgan over an office telephone decades later felt to researchers like receiving a call straight from a distant, long-dead past.
That same sense of historical resonance permeated Emily Van Duyne’s own archival deep-dives while writing Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation. The book was written largely in response to a cache of "new" letters by Sylvia Plath that emerged onto the public stage in 2017. These documents were not actually new, of course, but merely long hidden. There were fourteen letters in total, all addressed to Plath’s psychiatrist-turned-confidante, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, written between 1960 and 1963, with the final letter dispatched within a single week of Plath’s suicide.
The documents contained harrowing, firsthand accounts of Ted Hughes’s physical violence, including a detailed description of a severe beating that Plath believed directly induced her February 1961 miscarriage. These letters had originally been stolen from Dr. Beuscher sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s by a young researcher named Harriet Rosenstein, who had been commissioned by Knopf to write a critical biography of Plath that ultimately never made it to print. When Rosenstein attempted to sell the letters in 2017, their appearance at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair made international headlines, with commentators framing Plath’s documented allegations of abuse as shocking revelations.
For long-time Plath researchers, the revelations were not entirely shocking, but tracing the origins of that preexisting knowledge consistently led back to Robin Morgan’s "Arraignment"—a poem that younger students of literature and creative writing had often been taught to read and dismiss. When Van Duyne revisited the poem while preparing Loving Sylvia Plath, she was astonished to find that Morgan had laid out the core arguments regarding Hughes’s violence and his controlling grip on Plath’s life and legacy as early as 1972.
When Van Duyne subsequently wrote to Morgan to request an interview, the elder writer politely declined through her assistant but generously mailed two significant archival documents: an unpublished article Morgan had written in response to the emergence of Plath’s letters to Beuscher, which the Times Literary Supplement had planned to run before pulling it at the last minute, and her 1973 essay from the long-defunct Feminist Art Journal. Reading those pages sent shivers down Van Duyne’s spine, particularly upon discovering that the "purely Plathian line," "Why must the killing of me be so elaborate?" appeared verbatim from one of Plath’s letters to Beuscher, showing up nowhere else in Plath’s published corpus.
This proved that Morgan had read those confidential letters long before they were stolen—a fact Morgan later confirmed, though she declined to elaborate on the exact circumstances of her access. When Morgan constructed her argument against Hughes in "Arraignment," it was built on both rhetorical force and concrete textual evidence. The disappearance of those letters for half a century had effectively aided the literary establishment in painting Morgan as an erratic outlier in Plath studies. What hurt Morgan most, she later confided, was the sustained smear campaign framing her poetry as baseless, inflammatory libel when she had actually conducted meticulous, groundbreaking research to produce it. "Arraignment" did not merely tell the story of Hughes’s violence against Plath; it also laid bare a broader pattern of abuse by naming Assia Gutmann Wevill, Hughes’s lover from 1961 until 1969—the very year that Wevill tragically took her own life and the life of Shura, her young child with Hughes.
While Plath scholar Judith Kroll claimed credit in her 1976 book, Chapters In A Mythology, for being the first to publicly name Wevill, the historical record shows that Morgan had already done so four years earlier in 1972.
In 2009, writer Honor Moore accurately described Plath’s vital role in second-wave feminism, calling her an "avatar" for everything women were thinking, feeling, speaking, and writing at the time. Yet, that cultural positioning did not happen by accident. Morgan actively propelled Plath’s work to the vanguard of the movement by publishing poems like "The Jailer"—which Hughes had deliberately excised from the collection Ariel—in RAT, a radical feminist newspaper Morgan helped edit in the late 1960s. She also included Plath in her groundbreaking 1970 anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful.
That inclusion occurred so early in the arc of Plath scholarship that the short biographical note at the back of the anthology misdated Plath’s age at the time of her death. That biography concluded with the stark line, "There was no women’s movement then"—what stands today as perhaps the earliest printed manifestation of Morgan’s forthright conviction that domestic and marital violence directly contributes to the deaths of women, whether they are killed directly by their abusers or driven to suicide. It was the very same argument that Van Duyne would later make in Loving Sylvia Plath, backed finally by empirical research built directly upon the groundwork Morgan laid half a century prior.
When Van Duyne sent Morgan a copy of Loving Sylvia Plath upon its publication in July 2024, she waited anxiously for a response. About a month later, she checked her voicemail and heard Morgan’s unforgettable voice: "I am just calling to talk to you about your wonderful book, my dear. Call me back!"
After calling her friend Dani to gather her courage, Van Duyne dialed Morgan’s Manhattan number. When Morgan picked up, her immediate greeting set the tone: "Hold on, dear, I’m listening to these criminals at the Republican National Convention, I have to turn them down."
That initial exchange blossomed into a series of phone calls and emails that continued through the following spring. Plans to meet in person twice—with Morgan warmly insisting, "You’ll have to come and have tea in my garden"—were unfortunately thwarted by Morgan’s declining health. Yet, even during those later months, when Van Duyne mentioned she was working on a new project addressing campus sexual violence, Morgan immediately connected her with several organizations doing pioneering work on the grimly persistent issue. Morgan remained the literal embodiment of generosity and love, qualities she never divorced from a justified, sustaining rage at the state of the world.
Learning of her death amidst the relentless hustle of late summer—juggling class preparations, full-time parenting, and the exhausting illusion of seasonal rest—brought a heavy, splintering grief. For weeks, everyday life felt disembodied, with hands in one place, a head in another, and a heart caught somewhere else entirely, all while the broader cultural landscape hummed with global tragedies and systemic injustices.
No one understood these intersecting weights better than Robin Morgan, who dedicated her entire life to honoring a profound love for her son by fighting to make the world a safer, more equitable place for mothers everywhere. That lifelong mission was informed in no small measure by her deep engagement with Sylvia Plath’s final, towering poetry concerning art, motherhood, marriage, and systemic violence. Morgan understood better than anyone that the personal is political—helping to author the very slogan—and that art remains the most vital expression of that truth.
