SOURCE: Crick, Bernard. “No End of Blame.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 323 (7 October 1994): 38-9.

In the following review, Crick wholeheartedly endorses The Silent Woman as an insightful study of the genre of biography and the influences and preconceptions that appear in any biographer's writing.

I often meditate on the art of blurbs as well as on the art of biography. Learned libraries, unlike public libraries, do us no service to discard the jacket as if not part of “the text” or semiotic package.

This book's [The Silent Woman] blurb is not just a good blurb but one which this reviewer, having read the book three times (first in the New Yorker, then the American edition, now in an almost identical English edition), can for once wholeheartedly endorse. It describes “a brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography, in which [Janet Malcolm] takes as her example the...