Born in Berlin on 15 May 1927 to Jewish father Lonya Gutmann and German Lutheran mother Elisabeth “Lisa” Gutmann, Assia fled Nazi Germany with her family at the rise of WWII, eventually moving to Tel Aviv, Palestine. escribed as a free spirit, she met and married British soldier John Steele in 1947, hoping to secure a stable future for her family. The marriage, largely practical, ended in 1949.

In 1952, she wed Canadian economist Richard Lipsey, after a stint at the University of British Columbia. By 1956, aboard a ship to England, she met Canadian poet David Wevill—embracing an affair that led to marriage in 1960. Settling in London, she built a career as an advertising copywriter and published translations of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. 

What began as a cultural and intellectual partnership soon evolved into a volatile romantic triangle. Assia and Ted Hughes fell passionately in love, even as Hughes stayed married to poet Sylvia Plath. Their illicit connection escalated after Plath's suicide in 1963. Assia, pregnant with Hughes’s child, had an abortion shortly after.

Hughes moved Assia into Court Green, the Devon home he once shared with Plath, and they raised his children Frieda and Nicholas alongside their daughter, Shura, born March 3, 1965. Despite domestic attempts, Assia was haunted by the shadow of Plath and fueled by Hughes’s promised but unfulfilled commitments to marriage. Their relationship fractured further when Hughes embarked on new romantic entanglements.

On March 20, 1969, deeply distressed, Assia—haunted and desperate—acquired sleeping pills. Three days later, on March 23, she locked her London flat, gave pills to Shura, turned on the gas, and lay down beside her daughter. They were discovered deceased by a neighbor and an au pair . Their deaths mirrored Plath’s gas suicide six years prior.

Assia’s suicide was hushed—unlike Plath’s, it received scarce national attention. Ted Hughes later published Crow in 1970, dedicating it to both Assia and Shura. Unpublished notes detail his guilt and the loss of another life tied to his own choices.