SOURCE: Viney, Rebecca. Review of The Silent Woman, by Janet Malcolm. Midwest Quarterly 36, no. 2 (winter 1995): 227-28.

In the following review, Viney contends that The Silent Woman is intelligently written but maintains that Malcolm is one-sided in her adoration of Ted Hughes and less than sympathetic to other biographers who have had dissenting views.

The Silent Woman, not a biography itself but a book about biographies, offers almost as much information about Sylvia Plath's life and death as a biography would offer. If “the biographer at work … is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house” (9), then Janet Malcolm at work is like a burglar breaking into another burglar's house.

Malcolm examines each of the five Plath biographer's methods to “bring back the goods” (10) on Plath, and each book's worthiness in general. Malcolm praises Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson (1989) as “the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying” (10). However...