A woman scorned

IN this our high heat, a bleak anniversary. Fifty years ago, London; the tail end of one of the bitterest winters on record, deep in a cold that never seemed to crack.

A young woman with two children neatly folded a cloth, put it in the oven of her modest kitchen, laid her head inside and gassed herself. She had sealed the door of the children's room with wet towels. She was, of course, Sylvia Plath.

The death and its legacy are still raw. Just last month her literary estate's executor, Olwyn Hughes - sister of Plath's husband, Ted - described the brilliant, troubled American as "just nasty ... vicious and I think a bit crazy". Her prickliness towards Plath has never softened. It's well documented they did not like each other; Olwyn has the last word. And, for many years, the power - vexingly and farcically for Plath fans - over her work.

Ted Hughes' final act of contrition and love to his late wife is a lot more forgiving. The heartbreaking tome Birthday Letters was published in 1998, just before his death. It is the work of a man skinned, and does much to repair his public reputation after the trauma of Plath's demise. (She committed suicide after he fell in love with the wife of a rival poet.)

Hughes writes movingly about a woman hated, belittled, scorned by the establishment: "There you met it - the mystery of hatred" in his Birthday Letters. "But then they let you know, day by day / Their contempt for everything you attempted / Took pains to inject their bile." Like Keats, Plath's fame was posthumous. There's a photo of Hughes with W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at a Faber and Faber party in 1960; Plath was present, a writer herself, but not invited to join the esteemed men. Who will endure most potently?

She had courage, enormous courage, to keep on going. To enslave herself to the God of creation because she had to, she could not give up, no matter what was flung at her. There's another modern artist who reminds me of Plath's determination and stubbornness and courageous flaying of self. During my time in London I marvelled at her ability to endure; to keep on being magnificently honest, brazen and vulnerable in the face of extraordinary bile and belittling. She is Tracey Emin.

Her work is about the female body, lovers and miscarriages, masturbation and babies; in delicate line drawings, neon signs, photography and embroidery. Her subject is the self. A lot of people don't like it, yet it connects through the flint of truth. Her titles are brazen: Automatic Orgasm; Helter F--king Skelter; All The Loving (Underwear box); and My C--t Is Wet With Fear. Emin has done the seeming impossible: reclaimed that most ugly of words for women, made it into something powerful and intensely feminine. Usually, when I hear it, it's spoken by a man and there's a flinch - the assumption being that he doesn't like women very much. Emin displays the unvarnished female psyche in all its ugliness and beauty, complexity and contradiction, with art that connects fiercely and provocatively - and traditionally, the male canon has never been very accommodating of such hormonal eviscerating. She's still dismissed by some, still harangued and sniffed at, despite a major retrospective in London in 2011.

Thank goodness many now celebrate the vigour of Emin's honesty and expertise (her line drawings are astonishing). Plath didn't get the chance to ever know how powerfully her work would connect. Would she have had an inkling, back in 1960, that one day her fame might eclipse that of all the men in the publisher's photograph? I doubt it. And what of Hughes? He spent his life "permanently bending so briefly at your open coffin". Snared, to the end. And the saddest adjunct: four years ago their son, Nicholas, also committed suicide. He was 47.

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