Sylvia Plath’s ‘Little Fugue’ is one of twelve poems Ted Hughes added to Plath’s Ariel, after excising several poems deemed too ‘personally aggressive’. Like many of Hughes’s editorial decisions, this one enhances the ‘Daddy’ narrative in Ariel, strengthening the story of Otto Plath’s culpability in causing Plath’s suicide while diminishing the story that Hughes’s abandonment of Plath and his infidelity contributed to her depression and suicide. When Plath read ‘Daddy’ for BBC radio in 1962, she introduced the poem with an explicitly psychoanalytic tale about the speaker: ‘Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish.’ In popular notions of psychoanalysis (like this one Plath invents), just as a boy with an Oedipus complex longs for a sexual relationship with his mother, the daughter with an Electra complex is tormented by incestuous desire for her father. For the speaker of ‘Daddy’, this desire has been replaced by murderous rage, and, though she has in the past ‘tried to die’ to get back to him, she now redirects this self-destructive passion at her father: ‘Daddy, I have had to kill you’.