Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall opens our 2017 lecture series with Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, a brilliantly rendered account of the life of one of America’s most revered poets.  Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, was painfully shy and lived out of public view in far-flung locations like Key West and Brazil.  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 much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares.  Bishop has never been seen so fully as a woman and artist.  Marshall first encountered Elizabeth Bishop in the spring of 1975 when the poet appeared as a guest in a poetry workshop at Harvard, and was lucky to gain admission to Bishop’s last Advanced Verse Writing class in the fall of 1976, three years before her death.

The lecture, which will be held in the historic Stable, will be followed by a tea and book signing. The doors will open at 3:15 p.m.

Megan Marshall‘s first publications were book reviews in The New Republic. She has written on American history and literature and women’s history in publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and the London Review of Books. She lectures widely on the art of biography, research methods, and the lives and times of her subjects. She teaches nonfiction writing and archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College where she has been named the first Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor. An elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, she also serves on the boards of the Margaret Fuller Society, the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, the Copyright Clearance Center, and is a member of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary.

Refund requests will only be honored if made more than one week prior to lecture date.

We would like to thank Blantyre, a Relais & Chateau property, for their generous donation and support of this season’s Summer Lecture Series at The Mount.

The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact Nicole Williams at 413-551-5100 or by email, nwilliams@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event. Caregivers are admitted free-of-charge.