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.