Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes’s sole surviving child, has decided to sell some of the most intimate letters, photographs and memorabilia from a very tender time in the life of her parents next week via Sotheby's (the auction is online). First, there are passionate love letters, wedding bands, photos of the the couple, and then eventually of her parents with her and her brother Nicholas, (also a suicide.)

Of course she may need money, totally legitimate. Or she may feel she has finally had enough experiencing the ephemera of a union that has been under a microscope and she no longer needs the aide-memoirs which have probably been etched and sometimes gouged into her heart. Either way, it is a remarkable, heartbreaking sale.

In cross checking this photograph with her journals, from Lot 49, a family photo album, it appears to be Easter Sunday, April 22, 1962. "Ted had sat Frieda and the baby and me in the daffodils to take pictures. " They were living in Court Green. She had begun Falcon Yard, an autobiographical novel. The marriage was already deeply strained.

A month after this photograph was taken, the Hughes had the alluring Assia Wevill and her husband to dinner. Not long after that, Plath discovered they were having an affair. It was the beginning of the very end.

Hughes wrote the poem "Perfect Light" years later, which begins. 'It was to be your only April on earth/Among your daffodils. In your arms/like a teddy bear, your new son...." She had written contemporaneously, in The Rabbit Catcher, "And we too had a relationship-/tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring/sliding shut on some quick thing,/The constriction killing me also."

After Janet Malcolm died, I re-read her "Silent Woman" account of her own research into the many Plath biographies, leading ultimately to her own first hand research. It's a good place to begin.

Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s