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Janet Malcolm has produced a brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography, in which she takes as her example the various biographies of the poet Sylvia Plath.
The Silent Woman is an astonishing feat of criticism and literary detection. It is not a book about the life of Sylvia Plath, but about her afterlife: how her reputation was forged from the poems she wrote just before her suicide; how her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as executor of her estate, tried to serve two masters - Plath's art and his own need for privacy; and how it fell to his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as literary agent for the estate, to protect him by limiting access to Plath's work.
The Silent Woman, in the end, embodies a paradox: even as Malcolm brings her skepticism to bear on the claims of biography to present the truth about a life, a portrait of Sylvia Plath emerges that gives us a sense of "knowing" this tragic poet in a way we have never known her before. The result is a provocative work that will dispel forever the innocence with which most of us have approached the reading of any biography. It will be talked about for years to come.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
American Poets, Biography, Biography as a literary form, Canon (Literature), Executors and administrators, History and criticism, Marriage, Poets, American, American Women poets, American literature, Plath, sylvia, 1932-1963, Hughes, ted, 1930-1998, Poets, biographyPeople
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes (1930-)Places
Great BritainTimes
20th centuryShowing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
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The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
March 28, 1995, Vintage
Paperback
in English
0679751408 9780679751403
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The silent woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
1994, A.A. Knopf, Distributed by Random House
in English
- 1st ed.
0679431586 9780679431589
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"TED HUGHES wrote two versions of his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, a selection of diary entries covering the years between 1950 and 1962."
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May 17, 2020 | Created by Mek | Imported from Better World Books record |