The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

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At last she told me that Ted was in love with another woman, that she knew Assia and was terrified of her. She wept and wept and held onto my hands, saying, “Help me!” It's hard to change. But I think you have to, especially if you know you're going to write coldly about them." The story line of an old man marrying a young woman who turns out rather differently to what he expected has its roots in classical antiquity: the play Casina by Plautus (251–184 B.C.) being an early example. Perhaps the closest progenitor is from the Declamatio Sexta, a Latin translation of mythological themes from the Greek sophist Libanius. [19] I don’t quite know what the peculiar biographing of Plath is an allegory for. Personally, after the ravages of the myth I am no longer astonished (as I once was) by—say—the Pasternak Soviet Writers’ Union “trial,” or the formation of any Nazi-type group that sees the whole of existence in its own patently cranky terms. People are monstrous, stupid, and dishonest. If there is a bandwagon, the most unexpected people are only too happy to close down eyes, ears, and brain and get on it. . . .

She hesitated for a moment and then said, “There was no girl-to-girl between us. She was very absorbed in Ted; she wasn’t interested in me.”I really enjoyed this fascinating historical thriller. I Iove historical fiction especially when it is set around WW2 and features spies or the resistance. It always helps add to the tension and atmosphere as you realise that some people might have actually done the things described in the book. I always wonder if I would have had the courage to stand up to Hitler and try and make a difference.

Her super-power is a kind of x-ray vision, the power to see through people's pretensions. Masson, a psychotherapist who was made head of the Freud Archives in 1980 before falling out with the entire psychotherapeutic establishment, was hung by his own grandiose quotes, as the subject of Malcolm's book about the dispute, with some help from the writer (she described him as looking "a bit plump and spoiled" and went on to quote his foolish interactions with the maître d' at lunch). Malcolm's critique of her subjects is tempered by an equally stringent self-criticism, which, in the absence of much humour, can present now and then as piety. In The Journalist and the Murderer she calls herself out for the "self-satisfied tone" and "fundamental falseness" of her letters to Jeffrey MacDonald, the convicted murderer with whom she is trying to establish a rapport. She has written more generally about the cruelties of her trade, most famously in the opening line of that book, which caused outrage at the time but is now more or less taken for granted: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." That she does not exempt herself from this judgment is, in itself, a subtle bid for at least partial exemption, as the naming of one's faults tends to be. Now stop trying to get me to write about decent courageous people—read the Ladies’ Home Journal for those! It’s too bad my poems frighten you—but you’ve always been afraid of reading or seeing the world’s hardest things—like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen. I am a Minka Kent fan and, usually, Minka Kent's fast-paced, twisty thrillers offer more elements of realism than this book. Kent says that inspiration for her fictional tales often stems from her love of exploring “what happens when larger-than-life characters are placed in fascinating situations.” She examines that theme to great effect in The Silent Woman.bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it. . . . This is the first book by Terry Lynn Thomas that I have read and I look forward to reading more from her in the future.