The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Hardcover

Malcolm, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330335782 ISBN 13: 9780330335782

Publisher: Picador, 1994

Synopsis

This is a reasoned meditation on the art of biography, a work of criticism and literary detection and an examination of the means by which biographers justify their ends. The author takes as her example the various biographers of the poet Sylvia Plath and their conflicts with the Plath estate. This is not a book about the life of Sylvia Plath, but 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: her 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; and how five biographers, variously thwarted in their attempts to give what they felt to be a true account of the life have turned much of the literary world against Ted and Olwyn Hughes.

About this title

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."

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 maestro of gripping nonfiction investigation. --Sunday Times Cultures' 100 Books to Love

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0330335782
• ISBN 13: 9780330335782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224