What matters is how the term conveys the impression, consistent for decades, that the subject of Sylvia is overwritten, and in need of finishing: when Janet Malcolm published The Silent Woman 26 years ago, a jacket blurb announced that her book would make all future writing about Plath and Hughes superfluous, as Malcolm was “…the cat who had licked the platter clean.”Īpparently, the cats are still hungry (I count myself among them), or Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plathwouldn’t exist. I’m not sure an outfit with less than 20 distinct products classifies as an industry-off the top of my head, I count 13 Plath biographies published over 57 years. In 2013, Plath’s biographer Anne Steveson wrote to the New York Review of Books that two newly published biographies of Plath “…give us but more gossip to augment an obviously thriving and ever-profitable Plath industry” (she admitted in the same sentence she had read neither). Most big Plath projects arrive with a flurry of press asking what more can be said about her.
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