Passionate Plath Love Letters to Hughes up For Sale

Possessions of Sylvia Plath from the happier early days of her doomed marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, including ardent love letters and their wedding rings, are to go on sale at auction, Sotheby's said Friday.

The 55 lots are drawn from the private collection of their daughter, Frieda Hughes, and are estimated to raise up to £202,000 ($280,000) when they are sold July 9-21.

The 16 letters from Plath to Hughes date from soon after they got married in 1956, when she was still studying in Cambridge and he was working in London, and according to Sotheby's are the only such letters to have survived.

In one, Plath describes being "indissolubly welded" to her new husband and missing him: "Never before in my life have I been parted from one I love so immeasurably more than myself; my god, do let me be with you soon."

Plath looks forward to the "shining grail" of their reunion once she has completed her final exams in June 1957 -- "I shall never leave your side a day in my life after exams... I think if anything ever happened to you, I would really kill myself."

The letters contain drafts of her poems, as well as critiques of the work of Hughes, who was then working on his breakthrough collection "The Hawk in the Rain".

"My husband is a genius," she wrote.