SOURCE: "The Importance of Being Biased," in The New York Times Book Review, March 27, 1994, pp. 1, 18-20.

[In the following review, James describes how Malcolm's investigation into Plath's life was fueled by her sympathy for Ted Hughes and how The Silent Woman presents a revisionist view of Hughes's influence on Plath and her biographers.]

In small cemetery in Yorkshire is a gravestone that reads "Sylvia Plath Hughes, 1932–1963." Or at least that's what it usually reads. For a while in the late 1980's, vandals kept creeping into the cemetery and scraping away the word "Hughes." The poet's husband, Ted Hughes, had his family name restored, only to find it scraped off again, at least three times. No one ever discovered the vandals' identities, but it was assumed that they were enraged Plath devotees who had bought into a popular, simple-minded myth. She was St. Sylvia, the genius housewife driven to...