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Summary
Summary
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a brilliantly rendered life of one of our most admired American poets
Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America's best-loved poets. And yet--painfully shy and living out of public view in Key West and Brazil, among other hideaways--she has never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop's letters--to her psychiatrist and to three of her lovers--to reveal a muchdarker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with the Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares.
These elements of Bishop's life, along with her friendships with poets Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, are brought to life with novelistic intensity. And by alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader a compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined.
Finally, in this riveting portrait of a life lived for--and saved by--art, Marshall captures the enduring magic of Bishop's creative achievement.
Author Notes
MEGAN MARSHALL is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography for Margaret Fuller and the author of The Peabody Sisters , which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Marshall, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography for Margaret Fuller, takes an excursion through the life of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), one of 20th-century America's foremost poets. After surviving a troubled childhood with a sadistic uncle, a modest inheritance allowed Bishop to attend Vassar and afterward gave her the freedom to pursue poetry. Lovers led her from Paris to Key West to Petrópolis, Brazil. Bishop drank heavily and had to keep her lesbianism secret, but she also led a rich existence; she traveled the Amazon, swam naked in a lover's pool in secluded Petrópolis, and all the while produced a small but incomparable body of art. Marshall, weaving her own encounters with Bishop in the 1970s into this biography, expertly shows this charmed and sometimes sad life in intelligent, clear, and beautiful prose. Marshall repeatedly asserts that Bishop was "shy" but never reconciles this descriptor with the woman she shows interviewing T.S. Eliot, editing the Vassar yearbook, and finding a fashionable literary clique. Likewise, how was this winsome woman "difficult," as repeatedly claimed? But even if the poet herself remains elusive in this telling, this book is still a generous, enjoyable piece of work. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman Inc. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Marshall (Margaret Fuller, 2014) presents an enlightening look into the life of the private, meticulous poet who wrote such perfectly polished poems as The Fish and A Map of the World in this hybrid biography-memoir. Though Marshall interleaves brief chapters about her time with Bishop and such key players as Robert Lowell, Bishop's story can't help but prove far more engaging. From Marianne Moore's mentoring to her soulful friendship with Lowell, we glimpse Bishop's literary influences and gain better understanding of the ways writers of the time nurtured and challenged one another to innovate. Thanks to recently discovered correspondence with Bishop's psychiatrist and lovers, we glimpse sources of her loneliness and constant search for home. Her childhood losses and emotional abandonment no doubt played a role in the somewhat parental relationships she had with some strong, artistic, self-sufficient women. Yet her clinging to the feeling of being in love seemed often to dampen her artistic drive. A biography of Bishop is long overdue, and Marshall illuminates the poet's life with fascinating and inspiring details and insights.--St. John, Janet Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ELIZABETH BISHOP: A Miracle for Breakfast, by Megan Marshall. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99.) A former student delves into Bishop's complex personal life, which the poet fiercely tried to protect. Drawing on a trove of new documents, Marshall, a Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer, notes parallels between Bishop's published and private writing, and writes frankly about her alcoholism and central love affair. THE MORAVIAN NIGHT: A Story, by Peter Handke. Translated by Krishna Winston. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) An unnamed writer invites friends to a houseboat docked in the Balkans, where he regales them with stories of his travels across Europe. The writer's personal history is bound up with that of Central Europe, including stops in places irrevocably changed by time. THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICAN GROWTH: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, by Robert J. Gordon. (Princeton, $24.95.) The economic growth that powered the United States between 1870 and 1970 was probably a one-time event, Gordon, a noted macroeconomist, argues. As our reviewer, Paul Krugman, said here: "This book will challenge your views about the future; it will definitely transform how you see the past." SIGNALS: New and Selected Stories, by Tim Gautreaux. (Vintage, $16.95.) Gautreaux chronicles the life and times of ordinary Louisianians throughout this collection. Southern literary giants haunt Gautreaux's writing, including James Dickey and Flannery O'Connor, whose protagonist from "Everything That Rises Must Converge" he resurrects in one of his tales. The "stories all begin in the relatively humble territory of realistic fiction," our reviewer, Rebecca Lee, said here. "The real thrill of this collection is its inevitable march into poetry." THE WORD DETECTIVE: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary, by John Simpson. (Basic Books, $16.99.) A former chief editor of the dictionary, Simpson reflects on nearly four decades as a gatekeeper of the English language. Along the way, he offers insight into how words come into being and a look at origins of a scattering of words: inkling, deadline, apprenticeship, balderdash. CHRISTMAS DAYS: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days, by Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $16.) For years, Winterson has made a tradition of writing a story at Christmastime, ranging from the sentimental to the bittersweet: A team of frogs saves an orphanage; a woman finds solace in a haunted seaside mansion. In this gift book, she shares a collection of those tales, along with recipes for favorite holiday dishes.
Kirkus Review
A new biography of one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century.Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) wasn't prolificshe published only 100 poems during her 40-year careerbut she had a lasting impact on American letters. Pulitzer Prize winner Marshall (Writing, Literature, and Publishing/Emerson Coll.; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, 2013, etc.) was one of the aspiring poets Bishop taught in her final "verse-writing" class at Harvard in 1977. The experience was so profound that, upon discovering a trove of letters after Bishop's "close friend" Alice Methfessel died in 2009, Marshall set about to write this biography. The result is a sharp portrait of the tragedies and other influences that shaped Bishop's life and career. Bishop was only eight months old when her father died. After her mother was hospitalized for mental illness, Bishop was shuttled between her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, a place she loved, and her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts. After these early scenes, Marshall documents Bishop's maturation as a writer; her struggles with alcoholism; her 17 years living in Brazil with her partner, architect Lota de Macedo Soares; her many affairs; and her relationships with such writers as Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy. Best of all are Marshall's analyses of Bishop's poems, including "Song for the Rainy Season," "In the Waiting Room," and the book's subtitle. The interludes in which Marshall tells her own stories may be a distraction to some readers, but the chapters on Bishop are written with often chilling exactness, as when Marshall describes the uncle who drew young Elizabeth's bath and gave her "an unusually thorough washing" or the polio-stricken admirer who killed himself after Bishop rejected him. His suicide note read, "Elizabeth. Go to hell." Bishop shared with Marianne Moore a "near obsession with accuracy of detail and precision of language." This fine biography demonstrates the magnitude of Bishop's achievements without ignoring her flaws. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Marshall, whose earlier works include Margaret Fuller (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography) and The Peabody Sisters, here uses newly discovered letters by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) to offer a broader view of the life of the poet (who published only around 100 poems in her lifetime). -Marshall, who studied with Bishop during the 1970s at Bishop's poetry workshop at Harvard University, is able to give readers both an academic view of her subject as well as glimpses into the poet's personae. Marshall brings the sometimes elusive writer, who spent significant periods of her life in Key West and Brazil, to life, offering a cohesive and novel look at the ways in which subject and biographer are intertwined and the value of understanding a poet's biography while reading their work. VERDICT This study opens up a new way of looking at Bishop's life and her place in American letters. Recommended for poetry and literature lovers and fans of literary biography.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
