One of the most gripping and provoking things I have read about biography -- Hermione Lee
Compulsively readable, the best thing Malcolm has ever done -- Elaine Showalter * London Review of Books *
Intellectually explosive, morally challenging and enormous fun * Financial Times *
The Silent Woman is a book that sets out to be provocative and succeeds. It is superbly written, flowing like a piece of music from theme to theme, recapitulating here, changing key there, always disguising the complexity of its underlying construction -- Lucasta Miller * Independent *
Just as The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) was a provocative, and provoking, meditation upon the ambiguous ethical role of the journalist vis-a-vis his subject, and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995) was an equally original meditation upon the complicated art of biography (the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world) -- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books *
The maestro of gripping non-fiction investigation * Sunday Times *
This is so good; inventive, piercing and witty, it's both a fantastic essay on biography and a riveting revisiting of the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath story -- Kate Summerscale, author of The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murder * Waitrose Weekend *
A bleakly entertaining j'accuse of biography as a genre * TLS *
