SOURCE: Kagan, Wendy. Review of The Silent Woman, by Janet Malcolm. Chicago Review 41, no. 1 (1995): 92-6.

In the following review, Kagan focuses on Malcolm's protective stance of Ted Hughes in The Silent Woman, and expresses disapproval of Malcolm's negative portrayal of journalists, biographers, and readers of biographies.

The biographical approach to literature has an antique aura about it these days; certain circles condemn it as unfashionable. Ever since Foucault announced “the death of the author,” custodians of literary history and criticism have taken careful pains to separate the art from the life of the artist. But in the case of Sylvia Plath it would take an extraordinary muscle to pry these two entities apart; here the art and the life entwine to form one indivisible whole. A chain of biographical events—a troubled marriage, separation, and divorce; a feverish period of poetry writing; the suicide in 1963 (Plath was thirty...