One of the most respected American writers of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979) is predominantly known as a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her poetry collection Cold Springs, and the National Book Award in 1970 for her Complete Poems published a year ago. Again in 1976, she became the first American as well as the first female recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, also for her poems.
Bishop’s prolific poetic talents have somewhat overshadowed her almost equally meritorious prose works. The general reader was introduced to her prose works posthumously, after the publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s The Collected Prose in 1984. Her prose includes the remarkable portrayals of Marianne Moore, the recollections of her childhood spent in Canada and Massachusetts, the fascinating travelogues depicting myriad places and people, and so on.
The prose works of Bishop are difficult to categorize. According to Llyod Schwartz, the editor of the Centenary Edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prose (2014), the author herself had difficulties in characterizing her prose pieces by genre, wondering whether she should call her book In the Village and Other Stories or In the Village or Other Essays. Her prose is often semi-autobiographical, heavily drawing on personal memories, thus blurring the distinction between short stories and memoirs. Some prominent example of such memoir-stories are “In the Village”, perhaps the most-acclaimed since it was published in The New Yorker in 1953, “Gwendolyn”, “The Country Mouse”, “Memories of Uncle Neddy”, and “The U.S.A. School of Writing”. Bishop’s fond remembrance of her lifelong friend and literary mentor Marianne C. Moore, “Efforts of Affection”, may also be classified in this group. On the other hand, stories like “The Sea and Its Shore” and “Gregorio Valdes, 1979-1939” are comparatively more innovative and have lesser autobiographical elements. Other notable prose works of Bishop are “The Farmers Children”, “On the Railroad Named Delight”, “On Being Alone”, “From Times Andromedas”, and so on.
Travel writing is another genre of prose where Bishop excelled. They were written around the same time she was composing poems for her book Questions of Travel, in the 1950s and 1960s. They include her reflections on Rio, recollect her meeting with Aldous Huxley and his wife, tell the tales of an endangered autochthone tribe, and so on. Yet another major prose work of Elizabeth Bishop is the translation of Alice Dayrell Brant’s Minha Vida de Menina (The Diary of Helena Morley) – the diary of the author between the ages of twelve and fifteen in Diamantina, a small mining town of Brazil.
