SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “Going Underground.” London Review of Books 16, no. 9 (12 May 1994): 3, 5.

In the following review, Showalter describes The Silent Woman as nonfiction, yet notices that the story contains elements of mystery, romance, and melodrama pertaining not only to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's lives but also to the drama surrounding the five earlier biographies about Plath.

Ours is not an age in which literary events get much attention, but the publication in the New Yorker last August of Janet Malcolm's study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was an exception. Brilliantly packaged with reprints of the Plath poems which the New Yorker had originally published, the issue was a sell-out on both sides of the Atlantic, and for weeks no dinner party from Hampstead to the Hamptons was complete without a discussion of it. Now published as a book, The Silent Woman is ostensibly a scathing denunciation of...