Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. 1984. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Content:

In Elizabeth Bishop’s The Collected Prose we find her famous prose piece, “The Country Mouse,” wherein she describes her journey with her paternal grandparents from Nova Scotia to Boston, eventually to her hometown of Worcester. This piece is found in the first part of this collection, Persons & Places, joined by other pieces including:

“Primer Class”
“The Country Mouse”
“The USA School of Writing”
“Gregorio Valdes”
“Mercedes Hospital”
“To the Botequim & Back”
“The Diary of “Helena Morley”: The Book & Its Author”
“A Trip To Vigia”

In “The Diary of Helena Morley: The Book & Its Author,” she describes how she first came to find the small book Minha Vida de Menina, which roughly translates to “My Life as a Little Girl.” Bishop notes how the little girl from the diary took much of her surroundings for granted. This particular selection serves as Bishop’s retracing of young Helena’s steps so as to better understand the small girl from a Brazilian mining town.

The second part of The Collected Prose follows the pattern of her previous North & South/ A Cold Spring with a smaller group of works, including:

“The Baptism”
“The Sea & Its Shore”
“In Prison”
“The Farmer’s Children”
“The Housekeeper”
“Gwendolyn”
“Memories of Uncle Neddy”
“In The Village”

Critical Reaction:

Raine, Craig. “Good Manners.” London Review of Books. 1984. Vol 6, Issue 9. p8-10. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n09/craig-raine/good-manners

“Her own finesse and tractability didn’t always prevent Elizabeth Bishop from coming into conflict with the rules: she is criticised for using the word ‘spit’ in a short story and later for the impropriety of using ‘water closet’ in a poem. ‘But by then I had turned obstinate.’ In any case, this deliberately shaped memoir shows that these rules were necessarily strained, often by simple emotions of the baser kind, like human curiosity: ‘several times over the years Marianne asked me abruptly, “Elizabeth, what do you have on under your dress? How much underwear do you wear?” ’ And it is this maverick behaviour, these exceptions to the rules, which appeal to Elizabeth Bishop because they reveal the irrepressible individual – the nonconformist who took tango lessons; the baseball enthusiast; the eccentric who, however much she flattened her headgear, nevertheless possessed and wore ‘the Holbein/Erasmus-type hat, and later the famous tricorn’; the zany who learned to drive at a dangerously advanced age and preferred the front seat of the roller-coaster at Coney Island.”

The Collected Prose (1984)

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984. Print.

Content:

In Elizabeth Bishop’s The Collected Prose we find her famous prose piece, “The Country Mouse,” wherein she describes her journey with her paternal grandparents from Nova Scotia to Boston, eventually to her hometown of Worcester. This piece is found in the first part of this collection, Persons & Places, joined by other pieces including:

“Primer Class”
“The Country Mouse”
“The USA School of Writing”
“Gregorio Valdes”
“Mercedes Hospital”
“To the Botequim & Back”
“The Diary of “Helena Morley”: The Book & Its Author”
“A Trip To Vigia”

In “The Diary of Helena Morley: The Book & Its Author,” she describes how she first came to find the small book Minha Vida de Menina, which roughly translates to “My Life as a Little Girl.” Bishop notes how the little girl from the diary took much of her surroundings for granted. This particular selection serves as Bishop’s retracing of young Helena’s steps so as to better understand the small girl from a Brazilian mining town.

The second part of The Collected Prose follows the pattern of her previous North & South/ A Cold Spring with a smaller group of works, including:

“The Baptism”
“The Sea & Its Shore”
“In Prison”
“The Farmer’s Children”
“The Housekeeper”
“Gwendolyn”
“Memories of Uncle Neddy”
“In The Village”

Critical Reaction:

“Her own finesse and tractability didn’t always prevent Elizabeth Bishop from coming into conflict with the rules: she is criticised for using the word ‘spit’ in a short story and later for the impropriety of using ‘water closet’ in a poem. ‘But by then I had turned obstinate.’ In any case, this deliberately shaped memoir shows that these rules were necessarily strained, often by simple emotions of the baser kind, like human curiosity: ‘several times over the years Marianne asked me abruptly, “Elizabeth, what do you have on under your dress? How much underwear do you wear?” ’ And it is this maverick behaviour, these exceptions to the rules, which appeal to Elizabeth Bishop because they reveal the irrepressible individual – the nonconformist who took tango lessons; the baseball enthusiast; the eccentric who, however much she flattened her headgear, nevertheless possessed and wore ‘the Holbein/Erasmus-type hat, and later the famous tricorn’; the zany who learned to drive at a dangerously advanced age and preferred the front seat of the roller-coaster at Coney Island.”

Raine, Craig. “Good Manners.” London Review of Books. 1984. Vol 6, Issue 9. p8-10. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n09/craig-raine/good-manners