The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes [Paperback]

Janet Malcolm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 1995

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (March 28, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679751408
• ISBN-13: 978-0679751403
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #194,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( P ) > Plath, Sylvia

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Malcolm's masterpiece, November 17, 2000

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Paperback)

Malcolm's characteristic interest, in all her books, is to examine the many sides in a typically academic battle regarding truth and viewpoint and show how the many people involved in the battle often shoot themselves in their feet by making self-servicing claims in their own defenses. Naturally, few things work better for this condition than the problematic of biography, and in the case of Sylvia Plath Malcolm found a humdinger of a topic.

Most literate readers know about the basic facts of Plath's life--the marriage to Ted Hughes, his philandering and subsequent abandonment of her, and her suicide in 1963. On these basic signposts various biographers (and, more crucially, Plath's friends, family, and enemies during her lifetime) have hung all sorts of interpretations, to the point where a college classmate of Malcolm's, Anne Stevenson, agreed to write an unsymathetic account of Plath's life on behalf of Hughes and his sister Olwyn--and wound up devastating her own literary career by pleasing neither the Hugheses nor Plath's advocates.

This is one of the most thoughtful studies of biography and its problems ever written, and shows the horrible things people can do to one another in the name of trying to "set the story straight."

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating Biography of Biography, July 9, 2008

By 

Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Paperback)

THE SILENT WOMAN: SYLVIA PLATH AND TED HUGHES by Janet Malcolm is a biography through the lens of what's wrong with biography. It's fascinating to Plath fans and afficionados (me) and those who want to examine language, text and form and the barriers between whatever truth is and the outcomes of communication (me again).

Malcolm is explicit in her premise: A biography had been written of Plath by Malcolm's University of Michigan cohort, Anne Stevenson (Bitter Fame), that had been controversial. Plath loyalists fulminated against Stevenson's pro-Hughes bias, and the Hughes family denounced it because they said that Stevenson had not cooperated enough. Malcolm, who looked up to the slightly older Stevenson at U of M, who is also a poet of some standing, follows the process of the Plath biography, as well as other works on the famous poet and the machinations/efforts of her former husband and Plath's literary estate executor, Hughes's sister, Olwyn. Malcolm interviews many of the participants, including Olwyn, but not Ted Hughes, and works not to find a "right" or "wrong" but to understand the issues with biography that can create the problems of trying to portray another's life. In the process, she exhibits more on the life of Hughes and Plath that fascinates those who are interested in such things. She couldn't have chosen a better example/subject to use for this dissection, because their lives are compelling, and the drama around how those lives have been portrayed by others -- including the impression management on the Hughes side, which was no small matter -- seem never ending.

Malcolm writes, "In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened" (p 154). Malcolm faces this issue squarely and doesn't try to make a definitive statement about what did or didn't happen between Hughes and Plath, Plath and others, the Hughes estate and her various biographers. Instead she narrates her investigation, her own biases, and the flaws and quandaries that exist at every point along the way. Stevenson's troubles, the reader comes to see, may just be a strong form of the problems and doubts all biographers could -- and should? -- experience.

In the end, one gets the sense that the Hughes family worked perhaps too hard to control the impression of Ted after the suicide of his up-and-coming poet wife in the early 1960s (though who could blame him after he was villified and blamed for her suicide by those who took public "sides" in their marital discord, and he stated that he was also quite worried about his children's perceptions of their mother, family and selves if there was a free-for-all regarding Plath's literary and personal legacy). Ted and Olwyn were negative even toward literary scholars who interpreted Plath's poetry in ways objectionable to them and made working with the estate for very necessary quoting rights quite difficult. As Malcolm depicts Stevenson after her book's publication and the ensuing hue and cry, her break with the Hughes family and Plath estate and her reaction to same as wilted and beaten down. The book seems as if it were a tragedy in her professional life from which she must recover because of the interpersonal drama between the author and Olwyn Hughes.

Interestingly, the book also has a strong subtheme that examines the pressures, pains and stress of accomplishment by literary women born in the 40s who came of age in the 60s. (There's a brief discussion of Stevenson's marriages, and the impact her literary ambitions had on her family life.) Stevenson and Malcolm are around the same age as Plath, and this personal investment in the times and age is also fascinating from a political-gender point of view.

If I had any complaint about the work, which was an expansion of a lengthy New Yorker article that was printed in the 90s, it is that it ends too suddenly. After all the activity and investigation, I wanted Malcolm to make sense of it all for me, but the book just seems to cut off after Malcolm meets a man integral to the Plath suicide narrative, her downstairs neighbor, who may have been the last to see her alive.

Malcolm is a conversational and somewhat "confessional" feeling writer who is not afraid to be explict about her personal investment and lens that engages the reader and makes her feel an insider in this investigation of femininity, biography, rhetoric and one of the lightning rods of gender relations in the 20th century. I recommend it on any one of these levels.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More of a journey than a biography, June 20, 1999

By 

Bonny (Cedar Crest, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Paperback)

This is not a book for a casual reader to pick up and assume s/he will finish it understanding Plath & Hughes in a linear sense. It is more a record of the author's journey into the world of Plath biographers, and Hughes defenders. Having read those previously, I did find this work interesting but ultimately confusing. Were previous biographers co-opted by Ted Hughes' sister Olwyn, and were they harder on Sylvia's quirky personality than they would have been otherwise? That is the question and, to my mind, it is not answered here. Hughes' death last year makes it all more interesting; though the poems in Birthday Letters speak for himself, he no longer can. This will be a great sourcebook, in a sense, for biographers in the future, after ALL the players are gone, but at this time, for me, it raised more questions than it answerered.