SOURCE: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 213 p.

[A nonfiction writer and biographer, Malcolm is well-known for her contributions to The New Yorker. In the following excerpt, first published in The New Yorker in slightly different form in August 1993, she explains the "transgressive nature of biography" and how she became interested in the controversy surrounding the Plath biographies.]

Life, as we all know, does not reliably offer—as art does—a second (and a third and a thirtieth) chance to tinker with a problem, but Ted Hughes's history seems to be uncommonly bare of the moments of mercy that allow one to undo or redo one's actions and thus feel that life isn't entirely tragic. Whatever Hughes might have undone or redone in his relationship to Sylvia Plath, the opportunity was taken from him when she committed suicide, in February of 1963, by putting...