Miranda France

The Jane Austen of Brazil

A review of The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop. A delightful, funny and revealing memoir of Brazilian teenage life in a 19th century mining town

[Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images] 
issue 09 August 2014

When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951, she expected to spend two weeks there and ended up staying 15 years, a time of emotional turbulence and creative productivity. Bishop wrote poetry and prose and translated Latin American writers, including Octavio Paz, but this project, suggested by friends as a way to improve her Portuguese, is something completely different.

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