The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes

Description

Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm (author of Reading Chekhov, The Journalist and the Murderer and In the Freud Archives) examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history. The Silent Woman is a brilliant, elegantly reasoned inquiry into the nature of biography, dispelling our innocence as readers, as well as shedding a light onto why Plath's legend continues to exert such a hold on our imaginations.

Janet Malcolm's books include Reading Chekhov, In the Freud Archives, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. Born in Prague, she grew up in New York, where she now lives.

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 * Guardian * An astonishing writer with a grasp of nuance that can be electric * The Times * Intellectually explosive, morally challenging and enormous fun * Financial Times * Compulsively readable, the best thing Malcolm has ever done * LRB * 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 * Independent * The best-written and most stirring polemic of the year. Completely brilliant * The Times * 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 * Of the oceans of words written about Sylvia Plath, these are among the best... a master storyteller and a psychoanalyst rolled into one. Brilliant * Independent * The Silent Woman pioneered a new genre of biography in its exploration of Hughes and Sylvia Plath...The study ends with an exquisite twist that gives this book the urgency of fiction...insightful * Telegraph * The maestro of gripping nonfiction investigation * Sunday Times * Brilliant -- Megan Nolan * New Statesman * A bleakly entertaining j'accuse of biography as a genre * TLS *