Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.”–Christopher Benfey, Newsday I've read several books by Minka Kent and enjoyed them all, so I was happy to try another one. I loved the premise of this one, and from the description, it seemed pretty straightforward. However, I know this author likes to add in some wild twists to her stories, so I had developed some theories as I read and I was sure one of them would be correct. I have to say that this book surprised me in more than one way. The non-spoiler way in which it surprised me, is that the main character is very smart and keeps her cards close to her chest most of the time, instead of blabbing her suspicions to other people. There were only a couple of times that I thought maybe she shouldn't tell someone something. I loved that she went about investigating what happened to her husband's first wife in an intelligent way. Also, nothing in this book stood out to me as not in keeping with the characters as they developed, even when we finally find out the truth. This was a problem I had with one of this author's other books, Unmissing. Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The Silent Woman is a compelling look at love vs obsession and control, speaking to an important issue for women today. My favorite thing about this book was that I sensed definite Rebecca vibes, mysterious and enigmatic in setting with both the current and former Mrs. Westmore living on the property.

There are rabbit holes you can fall down. Janet Malcolm leaps determinedly into this Sylvia Plath rabbit hole head first. Sylvia’s awful suicide of February 1963 at the age of 30 began a conflict which lasted at least until Ted Hughes died in 1998. Ted himself edited Sylvia’s latest poems and published them in 1965 as Ariel. This was a book of poetry so great that readers who never read poetry would read and reread it.

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Poets, like politicians it seems, have partisans. And while such folks allow themselves to have a personal investment in the writer, an opinion that is not entirely subject to reason, the biographer should not. Or at least that is the prevailing assumption that Malcolm pokes and prods. She does this in the context of controversy over a new Plath biography written by an old classmate of hers.

Sylvie lives in her ex-husband's caretaker's cottage, located on the premises of Wells and Jade's elysian estate. (Huh?) Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and stayed up late to finish it. I'm looking forward to reading even more books by this author.In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction … only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.” I am just a vulture. A relative newcomer to the Legend that is Plath and Hughes/Hughes and Plath. I studied Hughes for A Level and tried Bell Jar at 19 and utterly loved it at 47. In the final poems, written in the terrible English winter of her death, Plath, like a feverish patient throwing off a blanket, sheds the ragged mantle of her rage and calmly waits for the cold of her desirelessness to achieve its deadly warmth.

Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16, 2021, typically referred to herself as a journalist. While that’s certainly an honorable occupation — and working for The New Yorker, she often kept up a journalist’s pace of publication — what she’s been writing since her first book, 1980’s Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetics of Photography, can more properly be called creative nonfiction. In that field, she was one of the greatest authors of the last forty years. Psychology, art, literature, and crime were all favorite subjects of Malcolm’s, and she investigated them to get at something close to the ever-shifting “truth.” I admit to being somewhat disappointed with her most recent collection of essays, Nobody’s Looking at You, but mostly her writing was nothing short of riveting.And Ted, yes, he's had a horrible time of it but how much of it has been his own making? He hid behind Olwyn, berated people for putting their story about her "out there" (because he chose not to does this mean no one else should've publicly discussed their relationship with her either?), he burnt her diary and "lost" another.

The widely accepted narrative is that Plath, a tortured, unhappy artist, was pushed over the edge by Hughes's extra-curricular activities outside their marriage and opted out of life itself. Thus Hughes is the adulterous villain who was indirectly responsible for the loss of the supremely talented Plath.Eeeeeeeek! Minka Kent is one of my favorite authors and I was sooooo excited to get my hands on this new book. Listen to silence. It has so much to say" was an intriguing theme that was introduced at the beginning of the book that, unfortunately, the author abandoned. The Silent Woman is a brave and really fascinating attempt to figure out who said what and why and who omitted this sentence here and who destroyed that journal there – a portrait of the literary biography community as a hornets’ nest. Actually that is an insult to hornets, they don’t fly around furiously stinging each other. How is it that I never read Janet Malcolm (beyond the occasional New Yorker article) before? I was prompted to do so by Malcolm's recent passing.