BOOKS: Poets in Suicide Sex Shocker!

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The tug-of-war between the Hugheses and the Plath scholars gives Malcolm the opportunity to explore the biographer's craft, which she likens to the work of "the professional burglar, breaking into a house." The book also represents Malcolm's answer to her own critics. Last June a jury in a widely publicized libel suit by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson found that Malcolm had fabricated quotations in a series of articles about him for the New Yorker. Despite her setback in court, Malcolm remains undeterred; The Silent Woman appeared in the New Yorker shortly after the trial, and Malcolm has not muted her intense, opinionated style.

Malcolm has a tendency to hog the stage; her sense of identification with Plath as another literary young lady of the 1950s is so often trumpeted that readers not interested in purchasing an autobiography of Janet Malcolm should consider themselves forewarned. But when Malcolm remembers her subject, she is insightful. Plath's appeal, suggests Malcolm, lies in her "not-niceness," her willingness to say what many feel but dare not articulate. Plath "was able -- she had been elected -- to confront what most of the rest of us fearfully shrank from," writes Malcolm. Furthermore, Plath gave voice to feminism before its time, instinctively distrusting the domestic limitations imposed on women of her generation.

Too many biographies later, the memory of Sylvia Plath has worn thin, like a game of telephone where the original message has been lost in the retelling. When an acquaintance of Plath's confides in The Silent Woman that she has gone to a hypnotist to retrieve further memories of the poet, the reader understands that it is time to go back to the source. The true, meaningful record of this poet is near at hand -- in her writings. It is there that Sylvia Plath -- harsh, brilliant, astonishing -- may be found.