Sylvie lives in her ex-husband's caretaker's cottage, located on the premises of Wells and Jade's elysian estate. (Huh?) Retired naval captain Sir John Morosus is very intolerant of noise after having survived an explosion on his ship. For some years he has been retired and living with his housekeeper who looks after him well, although he finds her chatter annoying. His barber arrives and after an argument with the housekeeper that disturbs Morosus, tries to calm down the Captain. He tells Captain Morosus that he should take a quiet young woman. At first Morosus is skeptical: is not a quiet woman like sea without salt? The barber assures him that he knows a dozen "quiet doves" who would want to marry an honorable man like him. Morosus starts to warm to the idea, when suddenly his long-lost nephew Henry appears. He is warmly welcomed: Morosus dismisses the idea of marriage and makes Henry his "son and heir". However, when Henry reveals that he, his wife Aminta and his friends are an opera troupe, Morosus reacts in horror particularly to the idea that Aminta is an opera singer. The captain throws the opera troupe out of his house and disinherits Henry. He instructs the barber to seek a silent woman for him to be his wife the very next day and then retires to bed. The barber reveals to the troupe how rich Morosus is ("sixty, seventy thousand pounds"). Aminta says that she will not come between Henry and his inheritance and offers to leave Henry. Henry tells Aminta that he cannot live without her even if it means losing his inheritance. The Barber has an idea. What if the opera troupe acts out a drama in which the ladies of the troupe have the roles of the prospective brides and they enact a sham marriage? The Bride will then become very noisy and they will act out the divorce. Henry likes the idea: his uncle has insulted the troupe, so they will show him their abilities "and who is the fool shall be fooled". The scene ends with a glorious celebration of the wonderful plan. The gradual unraveling of the mystery of what happened and who the spy was is brilliantly done and had me guessing until the end. The pace of the book is perfect being neither too fast or slow and ensured that the book was quite hard to put down. She hesitated for a moment and then said, “There was no girl-to-girl between us. She was very absorbed in Ted; she wasn’t interested in me.” During the course of researching Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Malcolm did something she has never as a journalist done before: she interfered with the story. The man responsible for awarding custody of the couple's child to Borukhova's husband, despite the woman's accusations he'd abused both her and the child, revealed himself in an interview with Malcolm to believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, that the world was run by a secret "communist-like system," and to hold a range of other opinions that would, surely, reduce his credibility as a witness. She passed on her notes to the defence attorney, who asked the judge for permission to re-question the man, after evidence had come to light "concerning his mental health". The judge denied the request.

Wagner-Martin is] so insensitive that she’s evidently escaped the usual effects of undertaking this particular job—i.e. mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe—which in the past have saved us from several travesties of this kind being completed.

By Ben Jonson

I'm deep into reading "Fear" by Woodward and needed to take a mystery/thriller break from the political noise. Del Mar, Norman (2009) [1968]. Richard Strauss. A Critical Commentary on His Life and Works. Vol.3 (2nded.). London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-25098-1. Below the surface of Olwyn’s story of the Yorkshire confrontation, with its anxious score-settling atmosphere, lie deep wounds, and one of them is surely the wound from which survivors of suicides never recover. Plath, as we know, “left at dawn” on another day, in 1963. The suicide “goes away,” and the survivors are forever in the wrong. They are like the damned, who can never make amends, who have no prospect of grace. Olwyn’s “Why doesn’t she say something?” expresses the anguish and anger of those who have been left without a word in a lake of fire. It is the best-written and most stirring polemic of the year. Completely brilliant.”–David Hare, The Times (London)

Royal Opera House Collections Online" with cast listing on rohcollections.org.uk. Retrieved 8 April 2014 Alfred Mathis, "Stefan Zweig as librettist and Richard Strauss", Music & Letters, vol. 25, parts 3 and 4, 1944. London.Deep down I suppose we’re all desperate for something be it love, attention, or validation. Some of us simply do a better job at hiding it, is all." Now stop trying to get me to write about decent courageous people—read the Ladies’ Home Journal for those! It’s too bad my poems frighten you—but you’ve always been afraid of reading or seeing the world’s hardest things—like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen. Yes, you're right. I guess I was so part of that culture that I didn't even think of it as a girls' ghetto. But it was. Women wrote about those things. There were no men writing those shopping columns. And I also reviewed children's books – that, too, women did. I had a small child then, so it was great." Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, was a writer; her second, Gardner Botsford, was her editor at the New Yorker. The breakthrough in her career came in the late 70s when she went to Philadelphia to write a long story about family therapy, just then taking off, the idea for which had come from talking to her father. She took the trip partly in an effort to distract herself from quitting smoking. "I needed to do something. I reported it for a long time. And then I gradually learned to write it up, without cigarettes." Then came the glowing memoirs—those of Al Alvarez, Elizabeth Compton (now Sigmund), and Clarissa Roche particularly. All had in common that their friendship with Plath had been slight. (Though she had real interest in Alvarez, they met only half a dozen times.) As no other of Plath’s friends would talk to the flood of journalists, would-be biographers, etc., etc., these three—the ladies particularly—had the field to themselves, from Butscher’s biography up to the present one. Roche and Sigmund now pronounce regally on anything to do with Plath as her great friends. . . . Henry himself is also very different from Jonson's heartless nephew: he loves his uncle, seeking his approval and is the one who calls the charade to an end when he sees how much his uncle is suffering. The Barber is also very different: in Jonson he is an accomplice of the nephew. For Zweig, the Barber is a good person who thinks well of Sir Morosus and is a benign schemer who drives the plot along, much like Mozart's barber Figaro. [25] After the disinheritance scene in act 1, he explains to Henry and the others "He (Morosus) is a thoroughly honest fellow with the best heart in the country." The planned deception of the marriage comes about as a way to "wean Sir John from his taste for marriage and return [Henry's] inheritance to [him] ... it's going to take a lot of effort to soap him up and ... cut this tuft of foolishness off". [26]

Zahr, Oussama (24 July 2022). "Review: The Silent Woman, an Opera About Putting on an Opera". The New York Times . Retrieved 10 July 2023.Probably, yes. Maybe it's just my own character, too; I'm impatient and bore easily, and so I assume others will be bored and I don't want to be boring." People grow older. They forgive themselves and each other, and may even come to realize that what they are forgiving themselves and each other for is youth. But a person who dies at 30 in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess. To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’s unfaithfulness.” Jade was, of course aware of the unconventional arrangement when she agreed to marry Wells, as well as the fact that Wells was initially deemed a suspect by the police, who were never able to establish precisely how Sylvie ended up in the pool. Or whether her injuries were accidentally or intentionally inflicted. In fact, one of the conditions of their marriage is that Jade is to play no role in Sylvie’s care and maintenance. Because her physicians are not sure how much of the world around her Sylvie is able to comprehend. She has overheard Wells use words like “manic, catatonic, physical outbursts, lethargic, unstable, mood stabilizers, appetite stimulants” in conversation with Sylvie’s caregivers. Also, Wells wants to avoid burdening Jade with any responsibilities concerning Sylvie. Thus, Jade is to keep her distance and never enter the cottage in which Sylvie now lives. Welcome to the Silent Woman Inn, a family run pub based in the heart of Wareham Forest, where you are guaranteed a warm welcome.

Once the plot of the suicidal poetess and her abandonment by the man with the witty mouth was released into the world, there would be no end to the variations played on it, or to Hughes’s burial alive in each of its retellings. When “Bitter Fame” appeared, declaring that it would “dispel the posthumous miasma of fantasy, rumor, politics, and ghoulish gossip” that was feeding Plath’s “perverse legend,” it was hardly surprising that the book was not greeted with open arms. The world likes to hold on to its fantasy, rumor, politics, and ghoulish gossip, not dispel them, and nobody wanted to hear that it was Hughes who was good and Plath who was bad. The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living. There is simply no choice between a dead bad guy and a live one. Given the task of reviewing a book whose declared object was to dismantle the narrative that he himself had set in motion, Alvarez could hardly have been expected to look upon it favorably. He raked over “Bitter Fame,” and when he was finished there were three bad guys where previously only one had stood: to Ted Hughes were now added Anne Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes. An ancillary narrative was born of Alvarez’s review—the narrative of the corrupt biographer and the evil sister.She has written sparingly of the details of her own life. She grew up in New York, one of two daughters of Czech immigrants. Her father was a psychiatrist, her mother had been a lawyer in Czechoslovakia but did not resume practice in the US. They were a loud family, a family of interrupters she has said and I wonder if that has anything to do with her ability to get swiftly to the point. Morosus also loves his nephew Henry (whom he had thought dead): he would be happy to live with Henry and treat him as his son. When Henry arrives, Sir Morosus says: "My house, my fortune are his. Everything. Now I do not need a bride...neither mute or silent." The myth was created by the following amalgam: Sylvia’s own version of herself and her situation, and of other situations after the separation. This was dictated by her paranoid mechanism (or whatever was wrong with her), perfected in small ways over the years. Toward the end, her remarks about others were little more than lies, designed to elicit maximum sympathy and approval toward herself. PLUS her mother’s attitude throughout. Endlessly supportive of what she knew to be a frail craft during Sylvia’s life, she continued this after her death: one must only see Sylvia’s “best side.” This sentimentalizing hypocrisy, forgivable in a mother, was largely supported by Ted Hughes, if only in silence, as he greatly pitied Mrs. Plath and the hammering she took after publication of Bell Jar and some of the poems. It’s my belief that if Mrs. Plath had said, when Sylvia died, “She suffered from mental illness, but was a marvellous person and I loved her” the myth would never have happened. Unfortunately, Mrs. Plath was ashamed of the mental illness—it has never been made clear, for instance, just how very ill Sylvia was with her first breakdown. . . . Easy to read this is an absorbing novel, the historical detail gives depth to a simple plot, but I would have liked more, to let me feel what living at that time was like. The first chapter set in Germany is pivotal and underscored with menace. What follows is well written, but the danger Cat the heroine faces is narrated rather than demonstrated by the protagonist through actions and emotions. Espionage is a dangerous world, but I didn't feel the threat, just knew that it existed. Opening in 1930's Nazi Germany with Hitler in power, ordinary lives are beginning to be affected. Anti Semitism is rising. Opposition is squashed. "If he could carry on as usual, he could convince himself that things were just as they used to be." No one should have ignored the actions of Hitler.