SOURCE: "Taking Sides in Polemics Over Plath," in The New York Times, April 5, 1994, pp. C13, C17.

[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Kakutani outlines the longstanding libel case against Malcolm for her previous book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), and its relevance to Malcolm's biography of Plath.]

Before we get to Janet Malcolm's vexing new book, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which originally appeared in different form as a single voluminous article in The New Yorker last year, a little history is in order.

To begin with, the volume stands as a kind of bookend to Ms. Malcolm's earlier book The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a heated attack on the author Joe McGinniss for betraying the trust of the convicted murderer Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald. For Ms. Malcolm, Mr. McGinniss's act—befriending Dr. MacDonald and subsequently writing a defamatory book about him—was a...