Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Other Side of the World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.stephaniebishop.com.au/
CITY: Sydney
STATE: NW
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
http://www.stephaniebishop.com.au/bio * http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/stephanie-bishop-sees-traps-for-the-homesick-on-the-other-side-of-the-world-20150730-gilx4f.html * http://bookbirdy.com/2015/07/13/meet-the-writer-stephanie-bishop-author-of-the-other-side-of-the-world/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016002783
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016002783
HEADING: Bishop, Stephanie, 1979-
000 01376cz a2200157n 450
001 10057278
005 20160119135923.0
008 160115n| azannaabn |a aaa
010 __ |a n 2016002783
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
046 __ |f 1979-03-27 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PR9619.4.B557
100 1_ |a Bishop, Stephanie, |d 1979-
400 1_ |a Bishop, Stephanie Louise, |d 1979-
670 __ |a The other side of the world, 2016: |b CIP t.p. (Stephanie Bishop) e-galley author information (“Stephanie Bishop’s first novel was The Singing, for which she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists. The Singing was also highly commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award. The Other Side of the World is her second novel and was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award under the title Dream England. Stephanie’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Australian, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review and the Sydney Morning Herald. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of New South Wales. She lives in Sydney”)
670 __ |a e-mail 2016-01-11 fr. author: |b (” . . . my middle name is Louise, and my date of birth is March 27 1979; Stephanie Bishop | Lecturer School of the Arts and Media University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia”)
PERSONAL
Born in Manly, Australia; married; children: Milla, Dashiell.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of Technology (Sydney, Australia); Cambridge University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia, lecturer; University of Oxford, England, visiting scholar, 2016.
AWARDS:Prize for New Australian Fiction, Readings, 2015, for The Other Side of the World. Grants, fellowships, and other awards from organizations, including Australia Council, Asialink, Australian Society of Authors, and Varuna.
WRITINGS
Also, author of the novel, The Singing. Contributor to publications, including the Australian, Australian Book Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.
SIDELIGHTS
Stephanie Bishop is an Australian writer and educator. She holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Bishop has served as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and as a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, England. Bishop and Philip Bigler collaborated to edit Be a Teacher: You Can Make a Difference. According to a writer in Library Journal: “Be a Teacher offers practical advice, inspiration, and guidance.”
In 2016, Bishop released her first novel, The Other Side of the World. Set in the 1960s, the book follows an English couple, Charlotte and Henry, as they move to Perth, Australia with their two daughters. There, Charlotte deals with complex feelings about motherhood, and she and Henry both struggle with the concept of home.
In an interview with Linda Morris, contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald Online, Bishop explained how she developed the idea for The Other Side of the World. While studying at Cambridge, Bishop began considering her grandparents’ move from her native England to Australia in 1965. She told Morris: “That’s when the characters of Henry and Charlotte started to come alive … but it was at that point, too, that I became pregnant and found my husband and I asking ourselves the same questions about our lives that my grandparents had asked themselves fifty years earlier–about where they would have a child and what opportunities did they want their children to have, and where was home.” In an interview on the Cassie Hamer’s self-titled Web site, Bishop remarked: “When our daughter was about one and a half we decided to move back to Australia. But once ‘home’ I found I missed England intensely, even though when I was in England, I often missed Australia in a similar way. My grandmother’s story and my dual sense of longing, of nostalgia, informed the novel from the earliest stages.” Regarding the book’s ending, Bishop told Hamer: “I’m really interested in the experience of ambivalence, and maternal ambivalence in particular. For me, the ambiguity that exists at the end of the novel is really an aftereffect of wanting of capture the force of ambivalence. The ambiguity was very deliberate though. I didn’t want the end to seem dogmatic, that is, I didn’t want it to seem as though I were casting a judgment upon Charlotte. Nor did I want it to seem as though the decision was clearly made in Charlotte’s own mind. Most importantly, for me, was the need to capture Charlotte’s own ambivalence.”
Reviews of The Other Side of the World were favorable. “This novel becomes a compelling read when Bishop captures the emotional landscape of Henry and Charlotte,” suggested Shoba Viswanathan in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly critic described the volume as “a beautiful, harrowing portrait of mental illness and the endless search for home” that is “full of excellent prose, especially in descriptions of landscapes.” Susan Coll, reviewer on the New York Times Web site, commented: “Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World is an exquisite meditation on motherhood, marriage and the meaning of home. The novel, Bishop’s second, is a rich period piece that captures an era when ‘every man and his dog’ seemed to be moving to Australia” Coll added: “Bishop is a stunning writer, and her attention to detail makes each scene visceral.” Writing on the Monthly Web site, Helen Elliott remarked: “Bishop … writes with clarity about the competing demands in life. She questions ideas, and ideals, of motherhood that historically made it almost impossible for a woman to be creative without the world collapsing about her, or on her.” Elliott concluded: “Bishop has written a confronting novel, addressing issues from those seemingly faraway times that can still resonate today.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2016, Shoba Viswanathan, review of The Other Side of the World, p. 28.
Bookwatch, September, 2007, review of Be a Teacher: You Can Make a Difference.
Library Journal, September 1, 2010, “For Teachers,” review of Be a Teacher, p. 117.
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2016, review of The Other Side of the World, p. 183.
ONLINE
Cassie Hamer Blog, http://bookbirdy.com/ (July 13, 2015), Cassie Hamer, author interview.
Hachette Australia Web site, https://www.hachette.com.au/ (May 9, 2017), author profile.
Monthly Online, https://www.themonthly.com.au/ (September, 2015), Helen Elliott, review of The Other Side of The World.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (September 30, 2016), Susan Coll, review of The Other Side of the World.
Stephanie Bishop Home Page, https://www.stephaniebishop.com.au/ (May 9, 2017).
Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com.au/ (August 9, 2015), Linda Morris, author interview.*
Stephanie's first novel was The Singing, for which she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists. The Singing was also highly commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award. Her second novel, The Other Side of the World is published by Hachette Australia and Tinder Press (Headline, UK) and will be released in the US in September 2016 by Atria (Simon & Schuster). It is the winner of The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2015, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2016, The Indie Book Awards 2016 as well as being longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize. It is also on the shortlist of the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards and the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
Stephanie’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Australian, The Sydney Review Of Books, The Australian Book Review and the Sydney Morning Herald. She is a recipient of two Australia Council New Work Grants, an Asialink Fellowship, an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship, a Varuna Mentorship Fellowship and Varuna Residency Fellowship. She holds a PhD from Cambridge and is currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of New South Wales. In 2016 she will be a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Life Writing at the University of Oxford. Stephanie lives in Sydney.
QUOTED: "When our daughter was about one and a half we decided to move back to Australia. But once “home” I found I missed England intensely, even though when I was in England, I often missed Australia in a similar way. My grandmother’s story and my dual sense of longing, of nostalgia, informed the novel from the earliest stages."
"I’m really interested in the experience of ambivalence, and maternal ambivalence in particular. For me, the ambiguity that exists at the end of the novel is really an aftereffect of wanting of capture the force of ambivalence. The ambiguity was very deliberate though. I didn’t want the end to seem dogmatic, that is, I didn’t want it to seem as though I were casting a judgment upon Charlotte. Nor did I want it to seem as though the decision was clearly made in Charlotte’s own mind. Most importantly, for me, was the need to capture Charlotte’s own ambivalence."
Meet Stephanie Bishop, author of ‘The Other Side of the World’13/07/2015
StephanieBishop-1x3aThere is no doubt, ‘The Other Side of the World‘ is one of my top picks of the year so far.
Author, Stephanie Bishop, has the most beautiful, poetic writing style and the book, as a whole, has much to say about nostalgia and the way in which people long for a place and time in their lives they can no longer be. You can read my thoughts on the book in more detail here.
The novel poses questions and refuses to judge its protagonists. It has left me thinking and wondering for weeks now – so, you can imagine my delight when Stephanie agreed to answer some of questions. It’s a fascinating read. Enjoy…
In The Other Side of the World, the two main characters are almost tormented by their feelings of nostalgia, and longing for previous places and times in their history. Is this something of which you have personal experience?
Yes, the book emerged out of two colliding elements: my grandparent’s migrations and my own sense of dual homesickness as I moved back and forward between England and Australia.
My grandparents migrated to Australia in the 1960s as Ten Pound Poms. My grandmother was very reluctant, and agreed to the move only at my grandfather’s insistence. Although she has lived more than half her life in Australia she still thinks of England as home and misses it intensely. I grew up hearing a version of this story over and over again, and as a child and young adult thought of my grandmother as something of a Whingeing Pom: this was the family joke in a way.
It wasn’t until I moved to England to study for my Ph.D. at Cambridge that I understood something of the cost of migration, and the real grief that my grandmother felt at the loss of her homeland. During this time I became very attached to the fen landscape and started to feel that this was my home too.
My grandmother came to visit me when I was living in England and we had a long conversation about why she agreed to move to Australia and how much she wished she had stayed in England. She said at the time that she often wondered why she didn’t leave her husband, and that she really agreed to the move for the sake of the children.
Not long after this conversation I discovered that I was pregnant and it was as if my present and my grandparents history were overlapping – I found myself asking the same questions that they asked themselves 50 years earlier. Where was the best place for a child? Where did we want to raise our family? What place is important to us?
I had been thinking about the novel for some time but it was at this point that the character of Charlotte really came alive. She started off as some kind of fusion between my grandparent’s fraught migrational history and my own predicament at the time. When our daughter was about one and a half we decided to move back to Australia. But once “home” I found I missed England intensely, even though when I was in England, I often missed Australia in a similar way. My grandmother’s story and my dual sense of longing, of nostalgia, informed the novel from the earliest stages.
Is there a place and time for which you feel nostalgic, or has writing this book cured of that tendency?
I do tend to get nostalgic for places and landscapes. I’m very restless, and quite happy to move around a lot. But then whenever I get to a new place I do tend to think that perhaps the previous place was not so bad after all.
There’s a definite fluidity, almost ambiguity, to the ending. Without giving it away, can you explain how and why you decided to approach it in this way? You also use an interesting device of repeating and splicing the final scene – and I’m interested to know how/why you came to that structure?
the other side of the worldI’m really interested in the experience of ambivalence, and maternal ambivalence in particular. For me, the ambiguity that exists at the end of the novel is really an aftereffect of wanting of capture the force of ambivalence.
The ambiguity was very deliberate though. I didn’t want the end to seem dogmatic, that is, I didn’t want it to seem as though I were casting a judgment upon Charlotte. Nor did I want it to seem as though the decision was clearly made in Charlotte’s own mind.
Most importantly, for me, was the need to capture Charlotte’s own ambivalence, her dividedness, about what she thought she should do, or wanted to do, at this point. So yes, as a writer, the ambiguity really emerged from thinking deeply about Charlotte’s own maternal ambivalence.
She is riven by two completely opposing desires (which I won’t go into detail about here, so as not to be a plot spoiler), and I wanted the end to be able to encapsulate both these possibilities as they exist inside her.
You’re right, there is repetition and splicing within this scene. This happens in the sense that Charlotte finds herself remembering elements of this final encounter in the lead up to her ultimate act.
I wanted the logic of her decision-making to be embedded within these memories, and to be an emotional process – rather than her thought processes forming a clear and coherent argument in support of what she ends up doing.
At that point, there is no clear line of reasoning that she could articulate and that would justify her final act. She’s just not coherent in that way at this point. Instead, she is overwhelmed by a series of emotional conflicts that emerge in relation to her remembering the recent encounter with her children.
It was a very hard scene to write, and I procrastinated for a long time before finally writing it very quickly one morning and then falling asleep. Once that scene was drafted it actually changed very little.
What are your personal feelings towards Charlotte and the way she behaves as a mother?
I really feel for Charlotte. But that’s kind of my job, too. I don’t think I could have written her as a character or represented her in the way that I do if I didn’t feel some real empathy for her situation. I think mothers and acts of mothering are judged particularly harshly in our culture, and this alarms me. I did want to press back against the frequent assumption that (to put it simply) motherhood makes one happy, that children are a necessary good, and that maternal life is some kind of blissful, natural state. Of course motherhood can be and often is all of these good things. But we tend to deny the force of maternal ambivalence and the intensity of feeling that comes with parenting young children.
With the rise of what has been termed the New Domesticity, this tendency to suppress the darker side of motherhood, is I think, increasingly common. As a mother and as a writer, I’m really interested in the expectations and assumptions that motherhood seems to carry in contemporary culture. I can see that Charlotte is someone that people might judge on the basis of her mothering. I’m interested too, in the ease with which people have tended to explain or justify her behavior by pathologising it – i.e. she must have postnatal depression to do what she does. For me, I feel as though she has been placed in an impossible situation, and her reactions are human reactions of a woman who finds herself trapped and often powerless. I’m also really interested in the fact that Henry does some fairly irresponsible things himself in terms of absenting himself as a father, and this tends to go unnoticed or at least he’s not charged for being negligent in his own parenting. We judge acts of mothering and fathering by very different standards, and I find this fascinating.
I understand you teach Creative Writing at UNSW. What’s the advice you find yourself continually repeating to emerging writers?
There are three pieces of advice that I find myself continually repeating. Firstly, read as much as you can and think deeply about this.
Secondly, try to write something every day so that you can see what is emerging of its own accord.
Finally, be prepared to spend more time revising and editing your work than you do putting together a first draft.
Who are the writers who have influenced your work?
They have been so many. And my influences change over time. There are some writers however, whose influence has persisted or that I find myself returning to over and over again. Those would have to be Virginia Woolf, A. S. Byatt, and more recently Deborah Levy and Elena Ferrante.
When I was working on The Other Side of the World I had a particular soft spot for the novels of Thomas Hardy, and although I didn’t realize it at the time I think that sense of landscape did seep into my work. I also find I’m often re-reading Freud and my PhD was in cotemporary American poetry, so that too comes in somewhere: Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Louise Brock-Broido.
Why writing?
It’s just something I’ve always done – I can’t help it, I have to do it. It’s how I make sense of the world.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a new novel, and a collection of essays
*Read an extract from The Other Side of the World here or visit Hachette Australia to purchase the book.
*Review copy supplied by the publisher on request
QUOTED: ""That's when the characters of Henry and Charlotte started to come alive ... but it was at that point, too, that I became pregnant and found my husband and I asking ourselves the same questions about our lives that my grandparents had asked themselves 50 years earlier – about where they would have a child and what opportunities did they want their children to have, and where was home."
AUGUST 9 2015
SAVE
PRINT
Stephanie Bishop sees traps for the homesick on The Other Side of the World
Linda Morris
Linda Morris
CONTACT VIA EMAIL
FOLLOW ON FACEBOOK
FOLLOW ON TWITTER
FACEBOOK SHARE
TWITTER TWEET
MORE
The Other Side of the World
By Stephanie Bishop
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK SHARE
SHARE ON TWITTER TWEET
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/stephanie-bishop-sees-traps-for-the-homesick-on-the-other-side-of-the-world-20150730-gilx4f.html
Author Stephanie Bishop: "You think of home as somewhere fixed and permanent and when you go away you realise it can't ...
Author Stephanie Bishop: "You think of home as somewhere fixed and permanent and when you go away you realise it can't be recreated and it can be lost." Photo: Dominic Lorrimer
Hachette, $29.99. Buy now on Booktopia
The seed for Stephanie Bishop's bittersweet new book, The Other Side of the World, was planted 10 years ago in Cambridge, England, where Bishop had gone to write her PhD.
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK
SHARE ON TWITTER
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/stephanie-bishop-sees-traps-for-the-homesick-on-the-other-side-of-the-world-20150730-gilx4f.html
The Other Side of the World, by Stephanie Bishop.
The Other Side of the World, by Stephanie Bishop.
Bishop had expected England to feel like home. It was the birthplace of her mother, Rosemary, and was the source of family histories, but it felt nothing of the sort.
"It felt like I was living inside an Enid Blyton illustration so there was a really profound sense of feeling dislocated."
Advertisement
It got Bishop wondering about her grandfather's experience. Sent to England aged 11 from India, where he had been raised British, he must have had similar dashed expectations.
"He has always been adamant life is better in a sunny country."
The longer Bishop stayed in England, however, the more she came to understand her grandmother, Mary, who had reluctantly followed her husband to Sydney as Ten Pound Poms in 1965 and felt keenly the loss of home.
"That's when the characters of Henry and Charlotte started to come alive," Bishop says, "but it was at that point, too, that I became pregnant and found my husband and I asking ourselves the same questions about our lives that my grandparents had asked themselves 50 years earlier – about where they would have a child and what opportunities did they want their children to have, and where was home."
The migrants' quandary lies at the heart of The Other Side of the World, the story of Charlotte, a young mother who comes undone when she reluctantly leaves Cambridge by the side of her Anglo-Indian husband Henry for a new life in Perth.
"You think of home as something fixed and permanent and when you go away you realise it can't be recreated and it can be lost, and I think Charlotte and Henry find that in different and unexpected ways as they move back and forth between countries."
Bishop was named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists for her first novel, The Singing, written when she was 21 years old.
The Other Side of the World shares with that novel a preoccupation with memory. In The Singing the narrator's chance encounter with a former lover prompts her to remember how their affair ended.
A lecturer in creative writing at the University of NSW, Bishop does not regard herself as a sentimentalist but is interested in how the past inhabits a person.
"For Charlotte, it really immobilises her, that overwhelming presence of memory. I'm interested in how memory overlaps the experience of the present."
The Other Side of the World was shortlisted for the 2014 The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award, and has had pre-publicity buzz and critical praise.
Bishop has been moved to tears by readers' heartfelt responses to her book, though the character of Charlotte has divided opinion, with some identifying with her choices and others casting her as a villain.
Bishop is devoted to her two children, Milla and Dashiell, but like Charlotte she felt unprepared for motherhood.
"I didn't feel as though anyone was talking about that or having that conversation so Charlotte was a way for me to investigate those experiences, not that she is me or I have made her decisions. But it was a way of exaggerating and extending and exploring that range of maternal feelings that tends towards the darker side of motherhood."
Bishop was born in the beachside suburb of Manly but moved to the Blue Mountains when her parents separated at age seven. Later, she went to live with her mother, sister and stepfather on bush acreage in a barn.
The author traces her poetic, painterly "way of seeing" to days spent roaming the bush, and once enrolled in a visual arts degree at the University of Technology, Sydney. Writing overtook painting when she fell under the spell of "brilliant teachers", Glenda Adams and the late poet Martin Harrison.
"As a child I wanted to either become a detective or an inventor which is not all that different from being a writer of fiction in a way."
The recent winner of the 2015 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Stephanie Bishop's first novel was THE SINGING, for which she was named one of the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD's Best Young Australian Novelists. THE SINGING was also highly commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD is her second novel, and as well as winning the Readings Prize, it was shortlisted for the 2014 Australian/Vogel's Literary Award under the title DREAM ENGLAND. This book also saw Stephanie recently longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize, shortlisted in the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards and shortlisted in the Indie Book Awards Best Fiction for 2015.
QUOTED: "This novel becomes a compelling read when Bishop captures the emotional landscape of Henry and Charlotte."
The Other Side of the World
Shoba Viswanathan
Booklist.
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Other Side of the World. By Stephanie Bishop. Sept. 2016. 256p. Atria, $25 (9781501133121).
A brochure's promise that "Australia brings out the best in you" prompts Henry to move his wife, Charlotte, and their two daughters all the way
from Cambridge, England, to Perth. Given that Charlotte is a painter, Bishop re-creates with fitting vividness the damp, cramped cottage in
Cambridge and the oppressive dry heat of the garden in Perth. Beyond the atmospheric setting, this novel becomes a compelling read when
Bishop captures the emotional landscape of Henry and Charlotte as they grapple with home, nostalgia, and belonging. Henry, the Anglo-Indian,
assumes that home building is a matter of conviction; Charlotte, who as a new mother loses her very sense of self, chooses to believe that home
would anchor her personal identity. Infidelity and professional subterfuge are part of their journey. In this story of the mid-1960s, readers can
appreciate the glimpses of immigrant experiences across the ages: the leap of faith into the unknown, the quelling reality that couples don't settle
in along the same trajectory, the dawning realization that where you're "originally" from always matters, and the faltering promise of the return
home. --Shoba Viswanathan
Viswanathan, Shoba
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Viswanathan, Shoba. "The Other Side of the World." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761643&it=r&asid=85634efd3b845a6d34cddecd9e7b6575. Accessed 5 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761643
----
QUOTED: "a beautiful, harrowing portrait of mental illness and the endless search for home"
"full of excellent prose, especially in descriptions of landscapes."
5/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494012686161 2/4
The Other Side of the World
Publishers Weekly.
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p183.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Other Side of the World
Stephanie Bishop. Atria, $25 (256p) ISBN 9781-5011-3312-1
A beautiful, harrowing portrait of mental illness and the endless search for home, this sophomore novel by Bishop (The Singing) depicts a
gripping psychological descent that touches on the saddest of truths: once you leave, you can never truly find home again. Painter Charlotte
Blackwood thrives in the gray winters of 1960s England, until the birth of her first child spirals her into a disoriented, heartbroken world of
postpartum depression and loss of self. Her husband, Henry, an Anglo-Indian professor who has never felt at home in England, receives a
brochure about emigration to Australia, and decides that this is what the family needs to make a new start. Overtired and pregnant again,
Charlotte reluctantly agrees, and within a few years, the family is resettled in the Perth countryside. But all is not as Henry hoped: he is met with
racism at his new university. Henry's questioning of his identity slowly consumes him until he can't complete the book he's writing, or get through
his lectures without drifting. Charlotte, as lost as ever, finds solace in a neighbor's friend, Nicholas, as she longs for England and sinks ever
deeper into a world of infidelity to find herself. Full of excellent prose, especially in descriptions of landscapes, this story leaves its characters and
readers wondering what is at the root of identity and nostalgia, and what a sense of home really means. Agent: Emma Paterson, Rogers, Coleridge
& White Literary Agency. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Other Side of the World." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 183. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287495&it=r&asid=14023f16df45e652bf6b7c7a3fbc0ac3. Accessed 5 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287495
---
QUOTED: "Be a Teacher offers practical advice, inspiration, and guidance."
5/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494012686161 3/4
For Teachers
Library Journal.
135.14 (Sept. 1, 2010): p117.
COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
For Teachers Be a Teacher You Can Make a Difference Philip Bigler & Stephanie Bishop 978-0918339-70-6 * Trade Paper 264 pgs * Index *
$19.95
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Written by 13 national award-winning teachers, Be a Teacher offers practical advice, inspiration, and guidance for pre-service, novice, and
veteran educators. It presents teaching as a viable career choice and encourages young people to enter a profession where they can make a
difference. It also offers practical and sound advice for bridging the gap between the theoretical world of college studies and the realities of
today's diverse classroom* The book is complete with appendices providing extensive information helpful resources and websites. Be a Teacher
has a place in all career and education collections.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"For Teachers." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2010, p. 117. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA236806394&it=r&asid=c0d0015d19c69869d50a9bb0d83cddc2. Accessed 5 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A236806394
---
5/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494012686161 4/4
Be a Teacher: You Can Make a Difference
The Bookwatch.
(Sept. 2007):
COPYRIGHT 2007 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
Be a Teacher: You Can Make a Difference
Philip Bigler and Stephanie Bishop, Editors
Vandamere Press
PO Box 149, St. Petersburg, FL 33731
0918339707, $19.95 www.vandamere.com
Thirteen national award-winning teachers have contributed to BE A TEACHER, a guide for novices and prior educators alike. From special
education needs and maximizing classroom impact to understanding what separates good teachers from mediocre, and understanding the joys of
teaching, BE A TEACHER is the item of choice for educator libraries and especially for novices seeking expert advice from practitioners in the
field.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Be a Teacher: You Can Make a Difference." The Bookwatch, Sept. 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA168663515&it=r&asid=d0a7f87cd0a2c794d463b748858aa311. Accessed 5 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A168663515
QUOTED: "Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World is an exquisite meditation on motherhood, marriage and the meaning of home. The novel, Bishop’s second, is a rich period piece that captures an era when 'every man and his dog' seemed to be moving to Australia"
"Bishop is a stunning writer, and her attention to detail makes each scene visceral."
BOOK REVIEW | FICTION
A New Novel About Marital Distress, a Depressed Mother and a Move to Australia
By SUSAN COLLSEPT. 30, 2016
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Stephanie Bishop Credit Craig Peihopa
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
By Stephanie Bishop
240 pp. Atria Books. $25.
A photograph on the pamphlet extolling the benefits of emigration features women in red swimsuits, skidding on water skis across Sydney Harbor — a jarring contrast to the bleak circumstances of a British couple named Charlotte and Henry in their mold-afflicted, too-small house in Cambridge. It’s so cold outside that the cows have steam rising from their flanks, and Charlotte, suffering from a debilitating postpartum depression while caring for a 7-month-old, has just discovered that she is, again, pregnant.
Set in the mid-1960s and spanning three continents, Stephanie Bishop’s “The Other Side of the World” is an exquisite meditation on motherhood, marriage and the meaning of home. The novel, Bishop’s second, is a rich period piece that captures an era when “every man and his dog” seemed to be moving to Australia as the country sought to swell its population by offering assisted passage to Britons who were “healthy and of good character.”
Staring at the brochure, Henry “finds himself filled with a strange nostalgia — for the light, the color of the sky, as if he’d already been there, to Australia.” In fact, the picture makes him think of his childhood in India, before the war, before he was sent to England. Nostalgia is a recurring motif in this novel, and Henry and Charlotte are both, in their own ways, already mourning their pasts before they embark on their future. Henry, when Charlotte first meets him, is literally surrounded by books, “piled in a circle around the armchair like a corrugated fortress.” A dreamy sort, he is predisposed toward nostalgia. Even when he reads poetry, he “prefers the memory of a poem to the actual reading.”
Book Review Newsletter
Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY
Charlotte’s initial loss is of herself: A talented artist, she now struggles to paint. Sleep-deprived and disoriented, she has lost track of time and language and has withered physically, with “gray-brown circles under her eyes” and a “yellow tinge” to her skin. She stares at the letter announcing the scholarship to the Royal College of Art that she was awarded at age 17 “as if it were a riddle. A code for a past life now irretrievable.”
This couple’s problems multiply under the southern sun. Charlotte, deeply homesick, meets an attractive male suitor. As an Anglo-Indian, Henry is undermined by racism in casual encounters and at the university where he is a lecturer. Wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes; and in Perth, Charlotte reflects that they are both nostalgic, this time for “the good life, or at least the fantasy of it.”
Even if this emphasis begins to feel overwrought, Bishop is a stunning writer, and her attention to detail makes each scene visceral. As Charlotte unpacks her linen, she sniffs it “to see whether it still smells of England, of damp mustiness sweetened by the smell of toast and fried onion.” The descriptions of India are particularly vivid. Henry, on the train to Delhi after visiting his mother in Simla, sees “three Indian women in iridescent saris emerging from the roadside mists as if rising out of smoke.”
Its lush and absorbing framework notwithstanding, this is a novel with plot points driven almost exclusively by a woman’s grim struggle with depression in an era — or at least in circumstances — that afford little help. “Home is a secret world that closes its door in your absence and never lets you find it again,” Charlotte observes, as she writes in her diary toward the novel’s denouement. Is this a sentiment the novel really intends to convey or is it the bleak assessment of an overwhelmed mind? Bishop is too skillful a writer to provide a simple answer.
QUOTED: "Bishop ... writes with clarity about the competing demands in life. She questions ideas, and ideals, of motherhood that historically made it almost impossible for a woman to be creative without the world collapsing about her, or on her."
"Bishop has written a confronting novel, addressing issues from those seemingly faraway times that can still resonate today."
NOTED
‘The Other Side of the World’ by Stephanie Bishop
Hachette; $29.99
BY HELEN ELLIOTT
Cover
SEPTEMBER 2015
SHORT READ
TOPICS
Culture
Books
YOU ARE READING1 / 3 FREE ARTICLES THIS MONTHAlready a subscriber?
Log in
Register for 5 articles free a month
SHARE
Email
Facebook
Tweet
Google+
LinkedIn
http://mnth.ly/xvMYZOv
ADVERTISEMENT
FROM THE FRONT PAGE
A confusing day
Turnbull meets Trump
‘The Dog’s Last Walk’ by Howard Jacobson
An irresistible collection of columns from a master storyteller
Rinse, repeat
The Turnbull government loves to announce big new policies, but can’t get any of them to stick
New tricks
Why do our political parties persist with economic rationalism?
Language woken up
Detained asylum seekers tell their own stories in ‘They Cannot Take the Sky’
The particular lives of ‘Certain Women’
Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is another quiet triumph
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ by David Grann
Oil, money, murder and the birth of the FBI
Base power
The energy crisis is all about politics rather than supply
The fighter
Sally McManus is the new face of Australia’s union movement
Charlotte, the central character in Stephanie Bishop’s second novel, is young, beautiful and has a gift for painting. She also has two tiny girls, no gift for domesticity and a husband who is at a loss to understand her. It is the early 1960s, before second-wave feminism, before medication for depression. Depression was not a recognised fact. You just coped. Or didn’t.
The Other Side of the World covers three critical years in the life of Charlotte and her husband, Henry. The prologue, ‘1966’, takes us momentarily to the end of the story: Charlotte is in Cambridge on a snowy winter’s day, deciding her future. Self or family?
The story begins in October 1963. Henry, Anglo-Indian, kind, bookish, a lost boy in many ways, is an academic. He and Charlotte have a seven-month-old baby, Lucie. Charlotte, attending to Lucie and the house, wonders if she will ever paint again. They live in a damp cottage deep in the countryside and Charlotte’s release is walking through a gloomy landscape that reflects her malaise. Henry hates the climate and applies for a job in Australia. Charlotte is aghast at having to pull up her deep English roots, but too defeated to argue. She is also, most devastatingly, pregnant again.
In Perth it isn’t wet, they are not cold, but the sun and the heat are relentless. The garden Henry assiduously cultivates shrivels. When Henry has to return to India, Charlotte, predictably, falls in love with a neighbour. If you are uncertain who you are, it doesn’t matter where you are; the problems remain. And love? Where does it go?
A lecturer in creative writing at the University of New South Wales, Bishop has a doctorate in poetry, and this informs her thoughtful, intense prose. Her protagonist is impossible to like, but Bishop writes with such confidence that Charlotte’s choices are always interesting.
Bishop also writes with clarity about the competing demands in life. She questions ideas, and ideals, of motherhood that historically made it almost impossible for a woman to be creative without the world collapsing about her, or on her. Those postwar years can look glamorous and innocent, but glamour and innocence were dependent upon monstrous inequalities. Elizabeth Harrower, who was there, has written about similar distress. Perhaps her work influenced Bishop, although Bishop has none of the particular Harrower steel forged by malice and distress. Bishop has written a confronting novel, addressing issues from those seemingly faraway times that can still resonate today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN ELLIOTT
Helen Elliott is a literary journalist and writer.