Janet Malcolm

Malcolm changed how we see biographers themselves. The Silent Woman, published in 1994, examines the battle over Sylvia Plath's life between her biographers, Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn, and shows how every account of a dead writer takes sides, comparing the biographer to a burglar going through a drawer. It makes you read any biography more carefully. Her Two Lives, about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Reading Chekhov apply the same scrutiny with lightness. Short, sharp and unsettling in the best way.