Sylvia Plath's daughter pleaded from the heart -- enough is enough.

Forty years after her mother committed suicide, one of the most famous poets of the 20th century still exerts an enduring, almost morbid fascination. Unrelenting analysis of her short, but tragic life shows no signs of fading.

"Leave them in peace," Frieda Hughes said of her mother, who killed herself in 1963 at the age of 30 and of her father, Ted Hughes, vilified by critics as a philanderer who drove the clinically depressed poet to suicidal despair.

Hollywood scriptwriters and Harvard professors revel in the tale. Psychoanalysts and academics pour over Plath's past. More than 100 biographies have been written about the woman who became a feminist icon.

Imagine what that does to the 44-year-old Frieda Hughes who, six years after her father's death, still blinks under the ghoulish spotlight.

Eager to quell the myth and lay her parents finally to rest, she has written the foreword to a restored edition of her mother's last volume of poetry "Ariel" in which Sylvia wrote with such chilling foreboding: "Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well."

Frieda Hughes, talking to Reuters before she flew to New York for the launch of the book, wonders if the fascination will ever fade.

"When things are quiet for a while, I get a sense of the earth settling over her and a sense of peace. And then it is dug up again," she said.

Hughes, a talented painter, children's story writer and poet herself, said: "Imagine I'm a boat on the ocean and there is a storm and that storm is the rehashing, the reinventing and the publicity and people bringing up my mother's death over and over again."

"For me, as her daughter, it is as if it never goes away and she is always dying."

The ghoulishness extends to the grave.

"For people going to see her grave, it is a tourist attraction. It makes me want to dig her up and bring her home."

In the foreword, she mounts a stout defense of her British father and says she has revised the once saintly image of her American mother, saying she had "a ferocious temper and a jealous streak."

"I was horrified when I found out that she destroyed my father's work not once but twice," she said.

It was a painful process. "Reading 'Ariel' is like being on an emotional rollercoaster without any straps" she said.

Then in the interview the composure cracked and she finally broke down, sobbing as she recalled Ted Hughes as a caring father who never spoke ill of her mother.

"He tried so hard," she said.

  Hughes refuses to see the biopic "Sylvia" in which Gwyneth Paltrow played her mother. And her disdain for the film was rammed home in her own caustic poem "My Mother" in which she wrote:

"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."