SOURCE: "Plath, Hughes and Malcolm: A Metaphysical Ménage à Trois," in The New York Times, April 17, 1994, p. E16.

[In this brief review of The Silent Woman, Cantwell stresses the elusive nature of biography and the futility of its quest to summarize a person's life.]

On Feb. 11, 1963, a young American named Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the gas oven of her London home. It was not the first time she had attempted suicide. This time she succeeded. Ms. Plath was survived by her husband, two children, her mother, her brother, some short fiction, a brief autobiographical novel and many poems. The last of them, collected in a book called Ariel, were written with a passion that insures their permanence—as their author was the first to realize. "I am writing the best poems of my life," she wrote her mother a few months before her death. "They will...