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Ted Hughes
Sprout meets Elizabeth Costello’s soul in the afterlife as she’s trying to write “A Letter to Sylvia Plath.” Costello counsels Sprout to look more closely at Ted Hughes’s writing and not just write it off as ridiculously masculine. Elizabeth Costello is a fictional character created by the author J. M. Coetzee. She appears in several of his novels, and in his book The Lives of Animals, she discusses animal rights and understanding animals through writing about them—ideas that Only the Animals tackles in all its stories.
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Elizabeth Costello Character Timeline in Only the Animals
The timeline below shows where the character Elizabeth Costello appears in Only the Animals. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
A Letter to Sylvia Plath: Soul of Dolphin (Died 2003, Iraq)
...and sometimes like people? The dolphin floated this with her new friend, the soul of Elizabeth Costello , and Costello insisted that it’s too easy to mock Hughes for being so masculine....
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