Burnt Diaries

Burnt Diaries is Emma Tennant's third volume of memoirs, set mostly during the 1970s, in which she lays bare the experience of her affair with Ted Hughes while she was editor of the avant-garde literary magazine, Bananas.Tennant's insights are engaging and honest - she offers perceptions of the writers that contributed to her magazine - from Angela Carter who was commissioned to write The Company of Wolves for it, to JG Ballard who was supportive of the magazine from its inception and wrote a story for each issue. Running a new literary magazine brought Tennant into contact with a range of notable and emerging artistic figures of the '70s - not just Hughes, Carter and Ballard, but Bruce Chatwin, Philip Roth, Andy Warhol, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Alberto Moravia and many others.Most compelling of all is Tennant's revelatory portrayal of Hughes - one of the earliest contributors to Bananas. In the shadow of Sylvia Plath. Tennant offers a portrait of him in that decade, the process of becoming one of the women fascinated by his power and attraction, and the legacy of that involvement.