SOURCE: Chisholm, Anne. “People Say the Life Is the Thing.” Spectator 273, no. 8679 (12 November 1994): 41-2.

In the following review, Chisholm judges The Silent Woman as engaging but finds that the book sheds little new light on the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes relationship or on the art of biography itself.

In 1989, Janet Malcolm, a New Yorker journalist, read Bitter Fame, a biography of Sylvia Plath, the American poet who committed suicide in 1963, by another American poet, Anne Stevenson. The book, Malcolm tells us, gave a focus to the unease she had felt while reading other biographies; and she was also intrigued because she recalled Anne Stevenson from college as an enviable, romantic literary figure. Predictably, Bitter Fame stirred up trouble, which was not hard to do given the hostility between Plath's supporters and those who wished to protect the man who had been married to her, Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate...