The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes

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The Silent Woman is a brave and really fascinating attempt to figure out who said what and why and who omitted this sentence here and who destroyed that journal there – a portrait of the literary biography community as a hornets’ nest. Actually that is an insult to hornets, they don’t fly around furiously stinging each other. The reader, who believes the biographer has been holed up in libraries poring through archives and neutrally weighing boxes’ worth of evidence, is blissfully unaware of the simple politics underpinning most biographies, namely those of access: Who controls your life story when you’re gone? Who gets to tell it and what makes their accounts authoritative? And what does it mean for those still alive, who are not characters in a novel but living, breathing people, to see their human foibles and human contradictions as mere writer’s material?

If he did hate all the hoop-la why didn't he and O bundle up all of Plath's writing, hire an academic who could be trusted to preserve and manage her estate, and tell everyone to bugger off? After Ariel, a book full to the brim with hatred, feminists had a new icon and the vicious hand to hand fighting began. The story was clear – Ted Hughes killed Sylvia Plath by his gross treatment of her culminating in deserting her and their children in the middle of the worst London winter for a century. what is truth? The responsibility of the biographer vs the irresponsibility of the journalist. and that the reasoned 'truthful' 'responsible' biography is paint drying dull; dishwater dull, when compared to the salacious memoir.Listen to silence. It has so much to say" was an intriguing theme that was introduced at the beginning of the book that, unfortunately, the author abandoned. In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction … only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.” Relatives are the biographer’s natural enemies; they are like the hostile tribes an explorer encounters and must ruthlessly subdue to claim his territory. Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.

This book blurbs like it'll be desert dry but it skips along like detective fiction (literary detective fiction ... obviously! ) Olwyn may have been protective of Ted but she was also a bully and easily as difficult and unpleasant as Sylvia is accused of being. Jade Westmore is living the seemingly perfect life with her new husband Wells in his palatial estate while his first wife Sylvie is living in the caretaker's cottage, a shell of the woman she once was after surviving a near fatal accident three years earlier. Always silent, Sylvie has lost her ability to communicate yet there is power in that silence.

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Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.”–Christopher Benfey, Newsday Malcolm goes on to say Plath herself could be mean. Well, darn, how mean was she? I've read lots of her work and don't see it as any worse than the rubbish you read in today's bitchy women's mags and we gobble them up.