Is it ever possible to know ‘the truth’ about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm (author of Reading Chekhov, The Journalist and the Murderer and In the Freud Archives) examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history. The Silent Woman is a brilliant, elegantly reasoned inquiry into the nature of biography, dispelling our innocence as readers, as well as shedding a light onto why Plath’s legend continues to exert such a hold on our imaginations.