On the Side of the Angels

Elizabeth Smart; Alice Van Wart (Editor)

ISBN 10: 0586089586 / ISBN 13: 9780586089583

Published by HarperCollins Canada, 1995

About this Item

Small rubbing front cover. Bumping of edges. Tanning of pages. Faint scratches on covers due to shelf wear. 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.

Seller Inventory # 000695

Bibliographic Details

• Title: On the Side of the Angels
• Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0586089586
• ISBN 13: 9780586089583
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography

About this title

Synopsis

The passion with which Elizabeth Smart lived and loved gave rise to one of the most intense literary love affairs of the 20th century and the power and innovation of her writing have won her work ever-increasing praise and recognition. The account of her dramatic romance with the poet George Barker, "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept", is now acclaimed as a modern classic. Opening in the mid-Forties at the height of her affair with Barker, this book, the second and final volume of 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 Barker. When "By Grand Central Station" was burned and censored in Canada by her mother, Elizabeth threw herself into the social whirl of London in the Fifties and Sixties, only to return to writing critically-acclaimed novels and poetry in the Seventies and Eighties.

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'