The tragic destiny and the rather thin work of the American Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) never cease to feed the legend, this woman whose poetry and the only novel with autobiographical accents, The distress bell (1963), are nourished by his malaise and his depression. Originally released in 1994, The silent woman. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughesby American journalist Janet Malcolm (1934-2021), one of the great writers of the New Yorker, try to see more clearly. Through a detailed and meticulous investigation, the author examines the tumultuous relationship between the poet ofArielcand her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, widely held responsible for all of the writer’s misfortunes and her suicide at the age of thirty. Against the current, Janet Malcolm questions this posthumous truth, talking to everyone and dismissing back to back the multiple quarrels of biographers and her many admirers – starting with certain feminist readers. In doing so, she offers us a fascinating reflection on the art of biography, which is basically that of making the dead speak.
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