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Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I came in the room, but nobody told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath recounts the same tale in her journal ( The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982).

He told me that on their first meeting at a Cambridge party, Sylvia and Ted disappeared into a room to 'make out' (as we said in the fifties) and emerged several minutes later with Ted bleeding copiously from a bite Sylvia had given him on the cheek. His name was Luke and he'd been at school with them. I had become friends with an old friend of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who'd brought me to Ted's reading. Of course we f- our brains out with me imagining Ted.

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I taxied home to my husband on the West Side, my head full of the hottest fantasies. My temperature rose and with it my panic. Nor in book inscriptions, I would add, especially those penned after the adrenaline rush of reading one's poems to adoring female fans. 'In lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath,' Samuel Johnson wrote. At least that way I could keep him as my secret demon. Perhaps I was lucky the flirtation was never consummated. Since his death, from cancer in 1998, dozens of women have come forward to claim that he was their secret lover. I have treasured Ted's inscription for years and wished we had f. Are these men from the cold and gloomy north so sexy because they taunt you with the promise of sex that can melt icebergs? Or is it the intensity of genius that attracts? Genius is a strong aphrodisiac. The only other man I've met who had such intensity was Ingmar Bergman, another born seducer - in the gloomy northern style. His eyes held you in his gaze as if you were the only person on the planet.

You could inhale the man's pheromones across the table - this stink of masculinity and musk that must have worked on countless girls. 'To Erica, a beautiful Surprise,' he scribbled flirtatiously, as he must have done with every woman he met. Knowing I'd want an autographed book, he snatched my copy of Crow and drew, on the title page, a lecherous snake climbing an Edenic tree. I remember sitting across a bar table with Ted and his friend Luke while Ted put the poetic moves on me. He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia's ghost kept me from being seduced. Moreover, he knew how irresistible he was in the Heathcliff fashion, and he did the wildman-from-the-moors thing on me full force when we met. He had a square jaw and an intense gaze and he reeked of virility. His hair fell against his broad forehead. He was tall and his shoulders were broad. He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal. When I met him, I understood why both these brilliant women fell. Both women were in love with Ted Hughes - who cannot have been an easy man to love but was compelling. Sylvia Plath had suffered depressions and suicide attempts during her adolescence, as she recounted in her novel, The Bell Jar. Assia Wevill, whom Ted Hughes apparently fell for while he was still with Sylvia Plath, was the child of Holocaust survivors - a group at great risk for suicide. The reasons were different for each - if suicide can ever have a reason. The poems were gory and fierce, full of nature red in tooth and claw - not surprising for a poet whose two lovers had committed suicide, the second taking their child along. In these astonishing poems, a crow with a bloody beak sits in a tree looking down on a world in love with death. He had just published his deathward poem cycle called Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. I met Ted Hughes around the same time I met the elderly publisher - early seventies.