Here's a Charles Simic review in the New York Review of Books of the new collection of Elizabeth Bishop's unpublished work, edited by Alice Quinn. One thing that struck me about this review is the downright queasy approach that Bishop scholarship has always had towards her lesbianism. Bishop was such a quiet, reserved figure, that everyone has been very careful not to refer to her as the big lesbo that she was. One way this manifests is how the word "companion" comes up a lot when Bishop's former lovers and her partner of 14 years, Lota de Macedo Soares, are discussed.
The fact that "companion" sounds like a word that Bishop could have actually used does not make it any less of a lame word, and it is so 1950's. It makes Lota sound like a handmaid or traveling nurse.
I also think it's weird that anyone who writes about Bishop waits until like the 20th paragraph to say that she dated and lived with women. And then, they rarely even use the word "lesbian" except, as Simic does, to refer to a poem as a lesbian poem. Partly this is because critics are scared to out Bishop when she clearly didn't want to be outed. But doesn't this change, now, that these new unpublished stuff is out there and basically everything Bishop held sacred is out in public view? Can't we call her a lesbian now?
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