Thomas Travisano, the preeminent Elizabeth Bishop scholar and founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, offers in Love Unknown a definitive biography of the renowned 20th-century poet. The book draws on an incredible bounty of archival sources, including correspondence among fellow writers, letters to her psychoanalyst and reviews of her work as it was published. Bishop had a lonely, nomadic childhood, defined by the loss of both her parents, before her formative young adulthood at Vassar and an explosive career that continued to bloom after her death. As he tells her story, Travisano also incorporates the legacy of criticism and biography that had followed Bishop's life, allowing Love Unknown to be both a summary of Bishop's experiences and an investigation of how such experiences have been framed in the decades since.
Travisano fuses historical context, literary analysis and investigations of social influence to create both an exhaustive view of Bishop's life and a surprisingly intimate one. While the book chronologically reconstructs Bishop's life and development in documentary fashion, its tone and use of sources facilitate the process of defining someone else's life with tenderness. Wherever possible, Travisano refers back to Bishop's own words through her poetry, focusing in particular on "One Art" at the book's conclusion to tie together the disparate threads of Bishop's social, personal and literary lives. Ultimately, while Travisano does pull in other theorists, critics and biographers, he allows the facts to stand on their own, trusting that such a life will speak for itself, as "Elizabeth Bishop's life is a great story." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor