Rating: 
Summary: Exhibit A
Review: To put my own bias up front: I think that Sylvia Plath is a middling versifier at best, who would have been relegated to the second rank of "confessional" poets, themselves a pretty dispensable group of scribblers, a long time ago had she been hit by a double-decker bus rather than gassing herself because her marriage had failed, the supremely petulant act that forever endeared her to professors of Women's Studies and other believers in the faith of Men Are Jerks. I also think, based on the preponderance of evidence, that Ted Hughes, while probably a philandering jerk, can't possibly have been as difficult to live with as his severely neurotic wife (Plath, I mean; he went on to marry an even more desperately screwed-up woman - proving, I guess, that he was what you'd call a slow learner) who was miserably unhappy long before she ever met him.I only read this book because Janet Malcolm used it as Exhibit A in her definitive treatise on the impossibility of objective biography, "The Silent Woman". (Those interested may consult my trenchant review.) If she says it is the best available study of Plath's life, I'll take her word for it, but in this case it's not saying much. Whether it was because Olwyn Hughes (a pretty tall glass of buttermilk herself, it would seem) was jerking the marionette strings or whether Stevenson (one of those Americans who, like T.S. Eliot, hope that if they live in England long enough that people will forget their "vulgar" origins) simply came to find Plath as negligible a figure as I do (nothing else could explain her wholesale inclusion of Dido Merwin's malicious hatchet-job - a catty piece of under-the-hair-dryer gossip that any serious biographer would have treated with an entire box of kosher salt), this book feels flimsy and half-baked. From the day of its publication, Plath-ists have set up a banshee wail over its lack of reverence for the Sacred Harpy. (I'm surprised Andrea Dworkin or someone like that never issued a fatwa.) But the rest of us, particularly lovers of good biography, have our own cause for complaint.
| 
