The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
In an astonishing feat of literary detection, one of the most provocative critics of our time and the author of In the Freud Archives and The Purloined Clinic offers an elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography."Among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . . able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."--David Lehman, Boston Globe
In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath to create a book not about Plath's life but about her afterlife: how her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as executor of her estate, tried to serve two masters--Plath's art and his own need for privacy; and how it fell to his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as literary agent for the estate, to protect him by limiting access to Plath's work.
Even as Malcolm brings her skepticism to bear on the claims of biography to present the truth about a life, a portrait of Sylvia Plath emerges that gives us a sense of "knowing" this tragic poet in a way we have never known her before. And she dispels forever the innocence with which most of us have approached the reading of any biography.
Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) was the author of a number of works, including Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which won the PEN Biography Prize, The Journalist and the Killer, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Reading Chekhov, Burdock, and others. Malcolm contributed to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a regular basis.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780679751403 |
| ISBN 10 | 0679751408 |
| Title | The Silent Woman |
| Author | Janet Malcolm |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 1995-03-28 |
| Number of pages | 224 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |