Women's History Commons^™

Janet Malcolm And Me: The Biographer Enters Her Book: Some Post-Modern Reflections On The Personal Of The Critical In Recent Biographies Of Women Writers, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Largely because publishers resist the expenses of precise and plentiful documentation, contemporary biography is a slippery, sometimes stale, but sometimes electrifying discipline. If any recent biographical project deserves further attention and analysis, it is Janet Malcolm's three-part biography of Sylvia Plath, first appearing in the August 23 and 30, 1993 double issue of the New Yorker and now published in book form as The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Knopf, 1994). With the perspective of an autobiographer examining (yet never mentioning) the incendiary implications of her own "missing tapes" incident which led to the New Yorker's defense of …