Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February 1963, and since then her poetry, fiction, and, increasingly, her life have maintained enormous power over readers' (particularly female readers') imaginations. Biographies continue to appear with regularity, despite the strong hold the Plath estate has on her work. But because of that hold, each biographer has been forced to accommodate the living (Ted Hughes, who was separated from Plath at the time of her death, and his larger-than-life sister, Olwyn, long the executrix), often at the expense of the dead. In 1989, Anne Stevenson's peculiar hybrid, Bitter Fame, was published, complete with an appendix full of devastating memoirs. It was not your average biography. When Janet Malcolm was first sent the book, she was less drawn to it by the Plath legend than by the fact that she had known Stevenson in the '50s, but she soon became captivated by the book's defeatist subtext. The dead woman's voice and writings seemed to overwhelm Stevenson's tentative narrative; and if that wasn't enough, there was also the none-too-angelic choir of those who had known Plath. "These too, said, 'Don't listen to Anne Stevenson. She didn't know Sylvia. I knew Sylvia. Let me tell you about her. Read my correspondence with her. Read my memoir.'"

Bitter Fame was soon garnering some powerfully bad notices, especially that of A. Alvarez in the New York Review of Books. Alvarez, the author of one of the most influential pieces on Plath, in his study of suicide, The Savage God, had some special, personal cards to deal, as have so many others Plath left behind. Because Malcolm's great theme is treachery--that of the interviewer, the journalist, the teller of just about any tale--the Plath mess seemed a perfect fit, and she decided to become a player, too. In 1991, Malcolm was having lunch with Olwyn Hughes in North London, 28 years to the day on which the poet died.

This is only one of the coincidences in The Silent Woman, a postmodern biography par excellence, which is less about the drama of Plath's life and still controversial death than about their continuing effect on the living. For Malcolm, all cards are wild, each one revealing more complexity, human cravenness, and, above all, brilliantly playful aperçus about human agency and writing's deceptions. I look forward to the dictionary of quotations that foregrounds the elegant "The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living." And then there's, "Memory is notoriously unreliable; when it is intertwined with ill will, it may be monstrously unreliable. The 'good' biographer is supposed to be able to discriminate among the testimonies of witnesses and have his antennae out for tendentious distortions, misrememberings, and outright lies." It's clear that Malcolm doesn't see herself as a "good" biographer--she openly declares her allegiance, but is more than capable of changing it and of showing her cards. Or is she? In the end, The Silent Woman is a stunning inquiry into the possibility of ever really knowing anything save that "the game continues."


From Publishers Weekly
The story of the marriage of poets Sylvia Plath (1933-1963) and Ted Hughes has continued to fascinate readers and biographers since Plath's suicide, as somehow representative of our common lot and yet also inscrutably dramatic. In a cunningly resourceful look at Plath's life, at her posthumous existence and at the struggles of her biographers to penetrate, document and interpret her history and her husband's role in it, Malcolm seizes the opportunity to reflect on the moral contradictions of biography itself ("the biographer . . . is like the professional burglar"), somewhat as she examined journalism in The Journalist and the Murderer . The book, reprinted from the New Yorker , is a highly skillful, intrinsically arguable exploration of mixed motives, considering in detail the characters of several figures: Anne Stevenson, one of Plath's biographers; Hughes, whom she regards with more sympathy than many do; his sister Olwyn; and some of Plath's friends and neighbors (e.g., A. Alvarez). Malcolm's characteristic mingling of observation and criticism, her self-scrutiny, her finely modulated tonal shifts and the strategies of her skepticism expose, with a generous range of nuance, the stories that tend to emerge from any story and complicate it--while writing one herself that is of surpassing interest. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-This book is as much about the process and pitfalls of writing biography as it is the story of the subjects' lives. Malcolm discusses many of the previous books about Plath with surgical precision. She is sympathetically aware that Hughes continues to live and change while Plath is forever frozen in memory as the brilliant but frustrated housewife and mother who took her own life. This sympathy, though strained by the author's dealings with Olwyn, Hughes's sister and guardian of Plath's estate, is strengthened by her interviews with friends of the couple and information gleaned about the poets' early life. In addition to the discussion of Plath, Ted Hughes and his sister, Malcolm explains how biographers work: they must decide what to keep, what to ignore, and what their point of view will be. A book that should provoke thought and discussion for YAs in class and in their own writing.Susan H. Woodcock, King's Park Library, Burke, VACopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The "silent woman" in Malcolm's title is the dead poet Plath, who stuck her head in an oven in 1963 and left her husband, Hughes, along with every other literary "player," to sort out the work she relinguished from then on. In this study, published last year in The New Yorker , Malcolm ( The Purloined Clinic , Knopf, 1992), a hypermethodical writer and an attentive reader, leads us, sometimes against our will, down the labyrinthine path of the making of the Plath legend. The insidious workings of biography dictate that upon one's death, one ceases to "own" the facts of one's life, Malcolm argues. She too is forced to cast her lot as a "player" and take a side, either for Plath, the poet betrayed by an unfaithful husband and attacked for writing "not nice" poems, or for Hughes, the protective husband and father tormented by public nosiness. In the end Malcolm tries to have it both ways: she prudently claims to support the Hughes side yet her feminist and literary sympathies embrace the silenced poet. A sure bet for literature and biography collections.- Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Los Angeles Times Book Review, Elaine Showalter
The magnetic pull of Sylvia Plath's story, and Malcolm's personal attraction to it despite her proclaimed scruples, produces the tension that makes The Silent Woman fascinating. The book is a tour de force, the best thing that Malcolm has ever done.


The Independent (U.K.), Lucasta Miller
The Silent Woman is a book that sets out to be provocative and succeeds. It is superbly written, flowing like a piece of music from theme to theme, recapitulating here, changing key there, always disguising the complexity of its underlying construction.


The Times (U.K.), Anthony Storr
In spite of the fact that there have been five biographies of Sylvia Plath along with other shorter accounts of her life and poetry, Malcolm's brief, pungent contribution is provocative, original and welcome. I don't think any reader of the book will ever be able to regard the genre of biography in quite the same light again.


From Booklist
Malcolm's name has become synonymous with the conflict between writers' freedom to interpret exchanges such as interviews and conversations, and their subjects' right to protect their reputation and standing. Her grueling experience with libel and the law has clearly sensitized her to the "transgressive nature of biography," and she couldn't have chosen a more perfect vehicle for exploring this concern than the ongoing obsession with Sylvia Plath. Plath, the mother of two and a poet of shattering originality, killed herself at age 30, ostensibly over her estrangement from her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, who was involved with another woman. Plath's death set off a torrent of biographical projects and the posthumous publication of Plath's private papers, including letters to her mother and her journals. Malcolm shrewdly, and bluntly, examines the motives behind such endeavors, particularly Hughes' editing and "misplacement" of Plath's journals, and the manner in which his overzealous and unkind sister, Olwyn, handled her responsibilities as executor of Plath's literary estate. Malcolm is sympathetic to Ted Hughes, who has endured 30 years of intrusion, but she also respects the more sensitive and articulate of Plath's biographers, especially the much maligned Anne Stevenson. As she muses over the taint of voyeurism associated with poking about in someone else's life--reading their letters, eliciting gossip from friends and colleagues--Malcolm admits that "we have no control over the facts of our lives," either in life or in death. And yet, her reflections on Plath and her writing are ennobling, her empathy for Hughes generous, and her forceful and resourceful style quite thrilling. This is a piquant and absorbing performance. Donna Seaman


The Guardian (U.K.), James Wood
The Silent Woman is one of the deepest, loveliest, and most problematic things Janet Malcolm has written. It is so subtle, so patiently analytical, and so true that it is difficult to envisage anyone writing again about Plath and Hughes. She is the cat who has licked the plate clean. It has an almost disabling authority about it, a finality like a father's advice.


Review
"Rich and theatrical."--The New York Times Book Review.

"The Silent Woman is one of the deepest, loveliest, and most problematic things Janet Malcolm has written. It is so subtle, so patiently analytical, and so true that it is difficult to envisage anyone writing again about Plath and Hughes. She is the cat who has licked the plate clean. It has an almost disabling authority about it, a finality like a father's advice."--James Wood, The Guardian (London)

"Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography."--Christopher Benfey, Newsday

"There is more intellectual excitement in one of Malcolm's riffs than in many a thick academic tome . . . She is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . . able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."--David Lehman, Boston Globe

"It is the best-written and most stirring polemic of the year. Completely brilliant."--David Hare, The Times (London)

"The Journalist and the Murderer was a deeply thoughtful exposure of the moral problems of in-depth journalism . . . [The Silent Woman] contains some of the best thinking I know on both the practical and the philosophical problems of biography."--Bernard Crick, New Statesman & Society


Review
"Rich and theatrical."--The New York Times Book Review.

"The Silent Woman is one of the deepest, loveliest, and most problematic things Janet Malcolm has written. It is so subtle, so patiently analytical, and so true that it is difficult to envisage anyone writing again about Plath and Hughes. She is the cat who has licked the plate clean. It has an almost disabling authority about it, a finality like a father's advice."--James Wood, The Guardian (London)

"Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography."--Christopher Benfey, Newsday

"There is more intellectual excitement in one of Malcolm's riffs than in many a thick academic tome . . . She is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . . able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."--David Lehman, Boston Globe

"It is the best-written and most stirring polemic of the year. Completely brilliant."--David Hare, The Times (London)

"The Journalist and the Murderer was a deeply thoughtful exposure of the moral problems of in-depth journalism . . . [The Silent Woman] contains some of the best thinking I know on both the practical and the philosophical problems of biography."--Bernard Crick, New Statesman & Society


Book Description
From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.


From the Inside Flap
From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.


From the Back Cover
"Rich and theatrical."--The New York Times Book Review.

"The Silent Woman is one of the deepest, loveliest, and most problematic things Janet Malcolm has written. It is so subtle, so patiently analytical, and so true that it is difficult to envisage anyone writing again about Plath and Hughes. She is the cat who has licked the plate clean. It has an almost disabling authority about it, a finality like a father's advice."--James Wood, The Guardian (London)

"Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography."--Christopher Benfey, Newsday

"There is more intellectual excitement in one of Malcolm's riffs than in many a thick academic tome . . . She is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . . able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."--David Lehman, Boston Globe

"It is the best-written and most stirring polemic of the year. Completely brilliant."--David Hare, The Times (London)

"The Journalist and the Murderer was a deeply thoughtful exposure of the moral problems of in-depth journalism . . . [The Silent Woman] contains some of the best thinking I know on both the practical and the philosophical problems of biography."--Bernard Crick, New Statesman & Society

ANNOTATION

From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm. "Rich and theatrical."--The New York Times Book Review.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Janet Malcolm has produced a brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography, in which she takes as her example the various biographies of the poet Sylvia Plath. The Silent Woman is an astonishing feat of criticism and literary detection. It is not a book about the life of Sylvia Plath, but about her afterlife: how her reputation was forged from the poems she wrote just before her suicide; how her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as executor of her estate, tried to serve two masters - Plath's art and his own need for privacy; and how it fell to his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as literary agent for the estate, to protect him by limiting access to Plath's work. The Silent Woman, in the end, embodies a paradox: even as Malcolm brings her skepticism to bear on the claims of biography to present the truth about a life, a portrait of Sylvia Plath emerges that gives us a sense of "knowing" this tragic poet in a way we have never known her before. The result is a provocative work that will dispel forever the innocence with which most of us have approached the reading of any biography. It will be talked about for years to come.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The story of the marriage of poets Sylvia Plath (1933-1963) and Ted Hughes has continued to fascinate readers and biographers since Plath's suicide, as somehow representative of our common lot and yet also inscrutably dramatic. In a cunningly resourceful look at Plath's life, at her posthumous existence and at the struggles of her biographers to penetrate, document and interpret her history and her husband's role in it, Malcolm seizes the opportunity to reflect on the moral contradictions of biography itself (``the biographer . . . is like the professional burglar''), somewhat as she examined journalism in The Journalist and the Murderer . The book, reprinted from the New Yorker , is a highly skillful, intrinsically arguable exploration of mixed motives, considering in detail the characters of several figures: Anne Stevenson, one of Plath's biographers; Hughes, whom she regards with more sympathy than many do; his sister Olwyn; and some of Plath's friends and neighbors (e.g., A. Alvarez). Malcolm's characteristic mingling of observation and criticism, her self-scrutiny, her finely modulated tonal shifts and the strategies of her skepticism expose, with a generous range of nuance, the stories that tend to emerge from any story and complicate it--while writing one herself that is of surpassing interest.

Library Journal

The ``silent woman'' in Malcolm's title is the dead poet Plath, who stuck her head in an oven in 1963 and left her husband, Hughes, along with every other literary ``player,'' to sort out the work she relinguished from then on. In this study, published last year in The New Yorker , Malcolm ( The Purloined Clinic , Knopf, 1992), a hypermethodical writer and an attentive reader, leads us, sometimes against our will, down the labyrinthine path of the making of the Plath legend. The insidious workings of biography dictate that upon one's death, one ceases to ``own'' the facts of one's life, Malcolm argues. She too is forced to cast her lot as a ``player'' and take a side, either for Plath, the poet betrayed by an unfaithful husband and attacked for writing ``not nice'' poems, or for Hughes, the protective husband and father tormented by public nosiness. In the end Malcolm tries to have it both ways: she prudently claims to support the Hughes side yet her feminist and literary sympathies embrace the silenced poet. A sure bet for literature and biography collections.-- Amy Boaz

Library Journal

The ``silent woman'' in Malcolm's title is the dead poet Plath, who stuck her head in an oven in 1963 and left her husband, Hughes, along with every other literary ``player,'' to sort out the work she relinguished from then on. In this study, published last year in The New Yorker , Malcolm ( The Purloined Clinic , Knopf, 1992), a hypermethodical writer and an attentive reader, leads us, sometimes against our will, down the labyrinthine path of the making of the Plath legend. The insidious workings of biography dictate that upon one's death, one ceases to ``own'' the facts of one's life, Malcolm argues. She too is forced to cast her lot as a ``player'' and take a side, either for Plath, the poet betrayed by an unfaithful husband and attacked for writing ``not nice'' poems, or for Hughes, the protective husband and father tormented by public nosiness. In the end Malcolm tries to have it both ways: she prudently claims to support the Hughes side yet her feminist and literary sympathies embrace the silenced poet. A sure bet for literature and biography collections.-- Amy Boaz

School Library Journal