Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2274848 in Books
• Published on: 1995-08-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February 1963, and since then her poetry, fiction, and, increasingly, her life, have maintained enormous power over 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."

The Glasgow Herald
‘In this stunning polemic, Malcolm shows that it is not always the subject of a biography who is invaded’

Customer Reviews

A touchy subject
Much has been written about the life of Sylvia Plath, to such an extent that her life has become a mixture of poetry, speculation and anecdotal evidence. This book takes the 'saga' of Hughes and Plath as an illustration of the difficulties behind writing a biography. It explores both sides of the argument, from the demonising of Ted Hughes by Plath's friends and fans to the loyal defence the Plath estate (at the time of writing, under the control of Hughes' sister) and especially Ted Hughes. Highly readable as a biography of the genre of biography. Malcom writes sympathetically of the subject, and remembers that in the end, Plath's death was a tragic event that Hughes and their two children suffered. This book is a lighthouse of logical and sensible writing amongst what can sometimes be a struggle to cannonise Plath against the backdrop of her evil 'seducer' and destroyer.

Brilliant read.
I read this book in two days, it is so absorbing I could hardly put it down. If, like me, you have not read other biographies on SP it is an excellent introduction, combining an informal "gossipy" familiarity with the main characters with beautifully descriptive prose. I am now about to embark on reading some of the other works she describes, she has so enthused me with her subject that I now feel I almost "know" some of these people. A brilliant read.

How not to write a biography.
I was quite surprised when I read Janet Malcom's biography of Sylvia Plath, to read anything but a biography of Sylvia Plath. It was certainly a very elegant and very clever reflection about the art of the biographer. It was also, in a strange way, a short biography of some of Plath's other biographers. It was most of all the inside story of what it is to investigate the life of an author, the legal fights to be able to quote or not to quote what had been written about him or her. Malcom's has managed the weird tour de force (that she described in the metaphore of the cluttered house at the end of her book)to write 200 pages about Sylvia Plath without saying anything about her. We understand that Sylvia Plath was a silent woman, but her biographer is certainly a discreet one. If you want to know better who was the author of these poems and that novel that have intrigued you, better look somewhere else.