6/3/2023 0 Comments Taking Summer by Emily Bishop![]() ![]() At last, having for five years dressed in mourning clothes, Gertrude Bishop became delusional, afflicted with imagined illnesses, convinced that she was being “watched as a criminal.” In 1916, she was permanently confined to a mental hospital. After his death, her mother’s grief slowly hardened into suicidal despair, and she tried to take her life by leaping from a hospital window. When she was still a baby, her father, William Bishop, died of Bright’s disease (the term a century ago for acute or chronic nephritis). For much of her childhood, this shy and sickly girl had been carted from one set of relatives to another like a piece of luggage.īishop was born in Worcester in 1911. She had just finished a month at the sailing camp on Cape Cod where she spent her teenage summers, a camp where she found respite from the families engaged in a tug-of-war over her upbringing (it would be too much to say her affections), her father’s in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her mother’s in Revere and farther away in Great Village, Nova Scotia. “I have never been homesick but just at present I feel awfly campsick,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop, the summer she was fourteen. ![]()
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