Elizabeth Smart

Smart, Elizabeth
Elizabeth Smart, novelist, poet (b at Ottawa 27 Dec 1913; d at London, Eng 4 Mar 1986). Smart was educated at Hartfield House, a private school in Cobourg, Ont. At the age of 19, she travelled to London, Eng, to study piano. She returned to Canada to work briefly for the Ottawa Journal, writing society news. During the 1930s, Smart travelled extensively and through contact with Lawrence Durrell she met George Barker, the British poet who was to become the father of her 4 children. She worked at the British Embassy in Washington during WWII and moved to England in 1943, where she worked to support herself and her family for the next 2 decades writing advertising copy and working for Queen (as literary editor) and House and Garden.

Smart's first work, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), immediately established a cult following. Republished in 1966, 1975, 1977 and in Canada in 1982, it has been critically hailed as a masterpiece of poetic prose and a homage to love unique in its style and sensibility. In 1977, following 32 years of silence, 2 new works appeared: A Bonus, a collection of sharp and witty poems, and The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals, a prose-poem that is both a continuation of and a comment on her early work. Smart returned to Canada in 1982 as the writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for a year. In 1984 followed a collection of previously unpublished poetry and prose, In the Mean Time. In 1986, Necessary Secrets, a volume of her early journals, appeared, further establishing and enhancing her literary reputation. In 1984, after a brief stay in Toronto, Smart returned to England and her cottage in The Dell, Suffolk.

Author ALICE VAN WART

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Canadian Writers
An online exhibition of documents about some of Canada's most celebrated writers. From the Literary Manuscripts Collection of Library and Archives Canada.