Miss Hughes, 42, an artist, illustrator and poet, has rarely commented on her parents' lives and she refused to co-operate with the BBC and its co-producers, the Film Council, and two Hollywood film companies, on Sylvia and Ted.

She claimed yesterday that she has been repeatedly pestered to lend her name to it.

"My feelings were not taken into consideration," she said. "I wrote this poem because nobody seemed to take me seriously."

She writes:

The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother's death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless - a souvenir.

Maybe they'll buy the video.

She writes of the film-makers:
Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven
Orphaning children.

 

In another verse in the poem, to be published in the magazine Tatler, she writes angrily:
. . .they think
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll.

 

Until now, Miss Hughes, who is married to an artist, Laszlo Lukacs, and lives in London, has been fiercely protective of her parents' lives and has stayed out of the limelight.

 

Plath killed herself, leaving two children, Frieda and Nicholas, in 1963 after she had been abandoned by Hughes for his mistress Assia Wevill after eight years of marriage. Wevill was later to commit suicide, too.

 

Four years ago, Miss Hughes, fighting back tears, made a rare public appearance, accepting the Whitbread Book of the Year Award on behalf of her father who had just died from cancer, for his volume Birthday Letters - 88 poems to and about Plath.

 

David Thompson, head of BBC Films, said yesterday: "We are naturally very concerned about the family's feelings but believe we have approached the film in a responsible and unsensational way.

 

"It will celebrate the extraordinary genius they shared."