The Silent Woman

The subtitle is misleading, as the book is more about the biographers of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes than about SP and TH themselves. Read as a break from the latest bio that I've been reading – Red Comet – and makes me appreciate the balanced perspective of that book, the first full bio of Plath that I've read. But I'm not sure Malcolm makes any amazing, earth-shattering points; she merely highlights what we should already know when reading biographies (but maybe forget all too often), that the true facts of a human life can never be fully known. A reminder to treat all such stories with respect, and to remember that there are two sides of every conflict.

There are several great reviews of this biography already, so mine will be more of a personal note of why I found it compelling. I happened to see it in a used book store while traveling in Europe and it appealed. Who knows why? Yes, there's the mystique of SP & TH, but more than anything it was the fact that Malcolm was, if the title was any indication, going to address both of them equally. And, really, she did. I found the book fascinating and as compelling a read as any psychological thriller. And like others have said, as or more compelling for me was Malcolm's analysis of the writing of biographies and of biographers themselves as much as their subjects. Of course they can't not be influenced by their own background and lives, but Malcolm's book shows that without it being accusatory in any way. Above all, the book is humane—people are complicated, and forgetting that clearly obscures much that's interesting about anyone, much less about subjects of biographies. The book is extremely well written—lucid, without fluff, with much sympathy but no fawning. It was a model of biographies, and a gem.