ELIZABETH BISHOP

February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979

FAMILY/CHILDHOOD

• Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916.Effectively orphaned during her very early childhood, she lived with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, a period she also referred to in her writing. Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death and the two were never reunited.

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• Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody. She was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts.
• She was unhappy here as she was separated from her maternal grandparents.

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• While she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma, from which she suffered for the rest of her life.
• Later in her life, her grandparents realised she was unhappy with them and sent her to live with her mother's eldest sister who in a tenement in an impoverished Revere, Massachusetts neighborhood populated mostly by Irish and Italian immigrants.

EDUCATION

• Bishop was very ill as a child and didn't receive much formal education.
• She attended Saugus High School for her freshman year. She was accepted to the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts for her sophomore year but was behind on her vaccinations and not allowed to attend. Instead she spent the year at the North Shore Country Day School in Swampscott, Massachusetts.

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• She boarded at the Walnut Hill School, where she studied music. Her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student magazine.Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash, planning to be a composer. She gave up music because of a terror of performance and switched to English where she took courses including 16th and 17th century literature and the novel.Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine (based in California).

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• In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy, Margaret Miller,Eunice and Eleanor Clark.Bishop graduated in 1934.

PERSONAL LIFE

• Bishop struggled with addiction for most of her life
• In 1971 Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel.

FAMOUS WORKS

• North and south (1946)
• A cold spring (1956)
• Questions of travel (1965)
• Sestina
• The fish

DEATH

• Two years after publishing her last book, Geography III (1977),she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusettes. Her requested epitaph, the last two lines from her poem The Bight, "All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful." , along with her inscription, were added to the family monument in 1997

BISHOP READING "THE FISH"

• http://youtu.be/HybrH2d1icM