On the Side of the Angels

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.