The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
The Silent Woman is a brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the nature of biography. Janet Malcolm (author of Reading Chekhov, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives) examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's controversial Bitter Fruit, to discover how Plath became the enigma of literary history, and how the legend continues to exert such a hold on our imaginations.
One of the most gripping and provoking things I have read about biography -- Hermione Lee
Compulsively readable, the best thing Malcolm has ever done -- Elaine Showalter * London Review of Books *
Intellectually explosive, morally challenging and enormous fun * Financial Times *
The Silent Woman is a book that sets out to be provocative and succeedsIt is superbly written, flowing like a piece of music from theme to theme, recapitulating here, changing key there, always disguising the complexity of its underlying construction -- Lucasta Miller * Independent *
Just as The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) was a provocative, and provoking, meditation upon the ambiguous ethical role of the journalist vis-à-vis his subject, and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995) was an equally original meditation upon the complicated art of biography ("the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world") -- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books *
The maestro of gripping non-fiction investigation * Sunday Times *
This is so good; inventive, piercing and witty, it's both a fantastic essay on biography and a riveting revisiting of the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath story -- Kate Summerscale, author of The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murder * Waitrose Weekend *
A bleakly entertaining j'accuse of biography as a genre * TLS *
Compulsively readable, the best thing Malcolm has ever done -- Elaine Showalter * London Review of Books *
Intellectually explosive, morally challenging and enormous fun * Financial Times *
The Silent Woman is a book that sets out to be provocative and succeedsIt is superbly written, flowing like a piece of music from theme to theme, recapitulating here, changing key there, always disguising the complexity of its underlying construction -- Lucasta Miller * Independent *
Just as The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) was a provocative, and provoking, meditation upon the ambiguous ethical role of the journalist vis-à-vis his subject, and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995) was an equally original meditation upon the complicated art of biography ("the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world") -- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books *
The maestro of gripping non-fiction investigation * Sunday Times *
This is so good; inventive, piercing and witty, it's both a fantastic essay on biography and a riveting revisiting of the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath story -- Kate Summerscale, author of The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murder * Waitrose Weekend *
A bleakly entertaining j'accuse of biography as a genre * TLS *
Janet Malcolm lives in New York City. Reading Chekhov, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession are all published by Granta Books.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781847085375 |
| ISBN 10 | 1847085377 |
| Title | The Silent Woman |
| Author | Janet Malcolm |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Granta Books |
| Year published | 2012-06-07 |
| Number of pages | 224 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |