By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Elizabeth Smarts passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightening A masterpiece.

‘Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightening … A masterpiece’ Angela Carter

‘At some point every good reader comes across By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept. And he or she recognises an emotion essential and permanent to us.’ Michael Ondaatje

‘A revelation…This short, powerful work has a profound influence on me and was one of the factors that made me want to be a writer.’ Beryl Bainbridge

‘I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such masterpieces of poetic prose in the world.’ Brigid Brophy

‘Explores a passion between a man and two women, one of them his wife – a love despairing and triumphant upon which the reader may gaze, awed, appalled, or even, perhaps, envious.’ The Times

‘Few writers have ever captured the full honesty of what passion means as shockingly and as piercingly as Smart. Today, its force still strikes us hard in the face, a beautiful and bloody blow.’ Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday

‘Constructed as a single, sustained climax, it is like a cry of ecstasy which, without changing volume or pitch, becomes a cry of agony.’ Spectator

‘The emotion, the truth and abject affliction comes through…to move the reader, and even to awe him.’ London Review of Books

Elizabeth Smart was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1913. She was educated at private schools in Canada and, for a year, at King’s College, University of London. Her landmark work, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept was published in 1945. After the war she supported herself and her family through journalism and advertising work. In 1963 she became literary and associate editor of Queen magazine but subsequently dropped out of the literary scene to live quietly in a remote part of Suffolk. She died in 1986.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780008610005
ISBN 10	0008610002
Title	By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Author	Elizabeth Smart
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	2023-04-13
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.