On the Side of the Angels: The Second Volume of the Journals of Elizabeth Smart - Hardcover

Smart, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0246136545 ISBN 13: 9780246136541

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1994

Synopsis

The second of two volumes of Elizabeth Smart's journals, covering the mid-1940s during her affair with the poet George Barker to her death in 1986. Born in Canada, the book charts Smart's departure into self-imposed exile in London at the beginning of the 1930s, the birth of her four children and her repeated, half-hearted attempts to leave the married Barker. When "By Grand Central Station" was burned and censored in Canada by her mother, Elizabeth cut herself off from her past. Thowing herself into the social whirl of the 50s and 60s, she wrote for "Queen" and "Tatler" and mixed with London's bohemians - including Jeffrey Bernard, and poets Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun, W.S. Sydney and Patrick Kavanagh and artists Craig Aitchison and Patrick Swift. The 70s was a time when Smart returned to her diaries and novel writing with renewed vigour, and once again won over the critics and the public for her stories and poetry, maintaining a high profile until her death in 1986.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Opening in the mid forties, 'On the Side of the Angels', the second and final volume of Elizabeth Smart’s diaries, charts her departure from Canada into self-imposed exile in London, the birth of her four children, and her repeated half-hearted attempts to leave the poet George Barker. When her classic autobiographical prose poem 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept' was burned and censored in Canada by her mother, Elizabeth placed herself in the social whirl of London in the fifties and sixties, only to return to writing her acclaimed poetry in the seventies and eighties.

‘The moan of the single mother raised to the power of a classic’
DAVID HUGHES, 'Mail on Sunday'

‘What exhilarates is the candour with which Elizabeth Smart looks at despair. Like Stevie Smith, whose wry, elliptical and ironic voice influenced her own poetry, she made her encounter with pain the route to self-realisation. It gave point to her journals. This second selection finds Smart bringing up four children alone, coping with the overdrafts, writer’s block, loneliness and depression. In the wake of her affair with the poet George Barker, who, having fathered her children, remained uncommitted and elsewhere, she realises all too clearly her need for house, husband, money, job, friends, furniture and other things... Her journals became the seed-bed for her other writings’
FRANCES SPALDING, 'Sunday Times'

‘A portrait of a woman who never lost her intelligence or her heightened sense of the absurdity of life. She must lit up any room’
BERYL BAINBRIDGE, 'Sunday Express'

‘Fascinating, searing and revealing’
ANTHONY CRONIN, 'Sunday Independent'

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0246136545
• ISBN 13: 9780246136541
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144