The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

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What a wonderful book, this is what I would call a serious ‘Girl Power’ book. Not only have we got a fabulous lead heroine but the villain is a woman too. It’s about time that we had a book with a strong female led cast of characters. This is the first I have read by this author and it most certainly will no be the last, I have fallen in love with her clever and articulated writing style. This book is fresh and ridiculously addictive to read, this is only book one in the Cat Carlise series but I am hooked, I can’t wait to see if there will be more. The Silent Woman by Terry Lynn Thomas is a marvellous historical suspense that had me engrossed from the start. Zweig, Stefan (2009) [1944]. The World of Yesterday. London: Pushkin Press. p.401. ISBN 978-1-906548-67-4. When I first read “Bitter Fame,” in the late summer of 1989, I knew nothing of the charged situation surrounding it, nor was I impelled by any great interest in Sylvia Plath. The book had been sent to me by its publisher, and what aroused my interest was the name Anne Stevenson. Anne had been a fellow-student of mine at the University of Michigan in the nineteen-fifties. She was in the class ahead of me, and I did not know her, but I knew of her, as the daughter of an eminent and popular professor of philosophy and as a girl who was arty—who wrote poetry that appeared in Generation, the university’s literary magazine, and who had won the Hopwood award, a serious literary prize. She had once been pointed out to me on the street: thin and pretty, with an atmosphere of awkward intensity and passion about her, gesticulating, surrounded by interesting-looking boys. In those days, I greatly admired artiness, and Anne Stevenson was one of the figures who glowed with a special incandescence in my imagination. She seemed to embody and to have come by naturally all the romantic qualities that I and my fellow fainthearted rebels against the dreariness of the Eisenhower years yearned toward, as we stumblingly, and largely unsuccessfully, attempted to live out our fantasies of nonconformity. Over the years, I watched Anne achieve the literary success she had been headed toward at Michigan. I had begun to write, too, but I did not envy or feel competitive with her: she was in a different sphere, a higher, almost sacred place—the stratosphere of poetry. Moreover, she had married an Englishman and moved to England—the England of E. M. Forster, G. B. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence—and that only fixed her the more firmly in my imagination as a figure of literary romance. When, in the mid-seventies, I read Anne’s book-length poem “Correspondences,” a kind of novel in letters, a chronicle of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) domestic despair over several generations, my vague admiration found a sturdy object. The book showed Anne to be not only a poet of arresting technical accomplishment but a woman who had lived, and could speak about her encounters with the real in a tough, modern woman’s voice. (She could also modulate it into the softer tones of nineteenth-century moral thought.) Children and dogs are welcome, however, please let us know upon booking if you are bringing your furry friends as we have a separate area for dogs, and of course a dog free restaurant for our other guests.

Del Mar, Norman (2009) [1968]. Richard Strauss. A Critical Commentary on His Life and Works. Vol.3 (2nded.). London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-25098-1. As a big fan of historical fiction, I knew right away that I will love this book. However, I was very surprised by Catherine's courage and fearfulness. I'm deep into reading "Fear" by Woodward and needed to take a mystery/thriller break from the political noise.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. . . . There wasn’t any romance in this book, although there were hints of it, so it’ll be interesting to see in future books how that develops. The end of the book wrapped the mystery up nicely, almost too neatly though, and it was good to see everything taken care of. There weren’t really any loose ends, which I commend Thomas on; a lot of times with mystery writers they get wrapped up in the main resolution and things can be left unanswered, which didn’t happen here. I have to say the I was a little disheartened to have the lesbians in the book be a murderess and a traitor; I was actually so surprised that there were secret lesbians at all, and I was really intrigued in their story, but it was disappointing to have the only LGBT+ representation be the villains of the novel. I hope I won’t see this as a pattern with Thomas’s work. My favourite character was Catherine. I really admired her strength, courage and determination. It would have been very easy for her to toe the line and do as society and her family expected but the fact she doesn’t really shows her character. It was quite startling reading about what rights a woman had at this time, which wasn’t actually that long ago, and how much control men had. Cat really pushes against this and refuses to conform. Her arguments with her sister in law were brilliant and helped add to some comic moments in the book.

Author Jade Westmore believes she has finally found love for a lifetime with her husband of one month, Wells. He’s a charming, successful, and recently divorced architect, and the grandson of Hollywood royalty, actress Viviette Westmore. There’s just one caveat. Behind the gates of the elysian estate that belonged to his grandmother, hidden from street view in the caretaker’s cottage, lives Wells’ first wife, Sylvie. It is as a journalist that Malcolm presents herself to her readers and the interested parties in her 1994 book The Silent Woman: Sylvia & Ted. As its title suggests, the book is Malcolm’s attempt to make sense of the complex relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The title comes from an anecdote by Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, about a Christmas visit Sylvia and Ted made to the Hughes family home in 1960. Olwyn subtly insulted Sylvia, and rather than engaging in a verbal argument, Plath gave Olwyn the evil eye, refused to speak, and insisted that she and Ted leave at dawn the following morning. As a child she recalls not understanding English and then suddenly understanding it and being relieved. No sense of outsidership remains. "It was more that I wanted to assimilate. I wanted to be American. And didn't want to be foreign. That was the wish." She reads Czech, badly; it was the only language her father wrote in, mainly technical papers. "That was the sad part. He never became a writer in English." 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. Alvarez’s memoir set the tone for the writing about Plath and Hughes that was to follow; it erected the structure on which the narrative of Plath as an abandoned and mistreated woman and Hughes as a heartless betrayer was to be strung. Although Alvarez is extremely discreet and gives no details of Hughes and Plath’s separation—about which, in fact, he knew a great deal—it is not hard to read his self-castigation as a veiled accusation against Hughes, whose rejection of Plath was, after all, much more profoundly final and unforgivable. The ordeal of Ted Hughes could be said to date from the publication of Alvarez’s memoir in “The Savage God” and its serialization in the Observer. Hughes was immediately aware of the destructive power of the piece, and he succeeded in getting the second half of the memoir pulled from the Observer, but he could do nothing about its appearance in “The Savage God,” or about its subsequent influence.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] Jade has already figured out that Sylvie is far from catatonic and is, contrary to Wells’ representations, capable of communicating. And armed with the stories related by Portia, Jade begins investigating. She has to know what Sylvie tried to tell her . . . and why. I am going to meet her in a few days.” I had heard of Jacqueline Rose’s project—it is now the book “The Haunting of Sylvia Plath”—and a couple of months earlier I had spoken with her on the telephone about it and about the prospect of meeting with her when I came to England. The conversation had been brief. Rose told me that she had delivered her manuscript to her publisher, Virago, and was waiting to find out how a “situation” that had developed between Virago and the Plath estate would come out. If things went well—if the difficulties were ironed out and the book went uneventfully to press—she would have nothing to speak to a journalist about. If things did not go well, she would have a great deal to talk about. Evidently, things had not gone well: I had an appointment to meet Rose. I've read several books by Minka Kent and enjoyed them all, so I was happy to try another one. I loved the premise of this one, and from the description, it seemed pretty straightforward. However, I know this author likes to add in some wild twists to her stories, so I had developed some theories as I read and I was sure one of them would be correct. I have to say that this book surprised me in more than one way. The non-spoiler way in which it surprised me, is that the main character is very smart and keeps her cards close to her chest most of the time, instead of blabbing her suspicions to other people. There were only a couple of times that I thought maybe she shouldn't tell someone something. I loved that she went about investigating what happened to her husband's first wife in an intelligent way. Also, nothing in this book stood out to me as not in keeping with the characters as they developed, even when we finally find out the truth. This was a problem I had with one of this author's other books, Unmissing.