The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm (Knopf, 1994)

 

This is a brilliant and fascinating book that attempts to untangle the webs of controversy and conflict surrounding the many biographies of Sylvia Plath, which uses Anne Steveson's biography, Bitter Fame, as a focal point.  That biography, which was guided, controlled, and perhaps even co-written by Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and agent for the Plath estate (Ted is the executor) reverses the perspective of earlier biographies by being sympathetic to Ted and critical of Plath.  For this reason it was condemned upon publication and Stevenson was considered a literary pariah.

Malcolm interviews all the parties involved (except Ted):  Stevenson, Olwyn Hughes, the previous biographers and memorists, and in sifting through all this material brilliantly reveals the perils and pitfalls of writing a biography,  questioning the purpose and worth of what she concludes is an impossible, inherently flawed, and foul genre. 

The book moves circuitously through its material, following tangents so assiduously that the main track is frequently and lengthily abandoned.  Reading the book is like swirling around in a big pot of flavorful stew that is constantly being stirred.  This sacrifice of clarity (and chronology) may frustrate a reader, who longs for the mess to be cleaned up rather than enhanced, but ultimately it feels like the best form for a book about the impossibility of objectivity to take.

Malcolm has a tendency to offer some of her opinions and interpretations as facts, although she is up front about his biases and sympathies.  The Hughes siblings seems to want to have their cake and eat it too, and I wished Malcolm had looked harder and more critically at their hypocrisy along with everyone else's.