Elizabeth Bishop's House Is for Sale

The house where Elizabeth Bishop spent her formative years is for sale for a mere $130,000. Located in Great Village, Nova Scotia, the house appears in many of her poems and "was central to Bishop's sense of herself." More:

The mother in the story is going mad, and the sign of her madness is a scream in the bedroom. The sound or its echo escapes from the house, and hangs over the village, forever. “Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”

I’m standing in the front room of the house in Nova Scotia where this autobiographical tale first stirred, years before it was born on the page. Across the road is the white church with its high steeple. These things were seen every day, a century ago, by Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who wrote the story, called In the Village. It appeared in The New Yorker in 1953, decades after her last summer with her grandparents in the hamlet of Great Village, in what is now called the Elizabeth Bishop House.

In a few months, it may be called something else, or nothing at all. The house is up for sale (for $130,000), after a decade as a retreat for writers, artists and Bishop scholars. The nine people who bought it in 2004 for its associations with the renowned poet, and who covered much of its upkeep out of their own pockets, have reached the end of their stewardship.

“We’re not stopping this because there’s no demand,” says Sandra Barry, one of the co-owners, and author of Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia’s ‘Home-Made’ Poet. “We had one of our busiest summers this year, and 80 per cent of the people were first-timers.”

Great Village is a good place to ponder the mystique of houses that have been homes for notable writers. Bishop lived here for only a couple of years as a child, visited periodically thereafter, and spent much of her adult life in Brazil and the United States. But for many who have studied her writings, including her many poems about Nova Scotia, the old two-storey building in Great Village is the Bishop house.

“It was central to Bishop’s sense of herself,” Barry says. “It appears in her work, but the more important thing is that it symbolically establishes her foundation, for looking at all other houses and homes, and at the world.”

People have been making pilgrimages here, Barry says, almost since Bishop died in 1979. Their periodic knocking at the door alerted the previous owner to the house’s place in the geography of literature. He had it registered provincially as a historical site in 1997. The gardens were damaged during a flash flood in September, but the house was not – contrary to some local reports. [...]

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