The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

by Janet Malcolm

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307830616
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/16/2013
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Janet Malcolm's previous books are Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography; Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession; In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings; The Silent Woman: Slyvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and The Crime of Sheila McGough. She lives in New York with her husband, Gardner Botsford.

Editorial Reviews

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 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)

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

"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

From the Publisher