By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, a Life

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

I suspect that only a woman biographer could have done justice to
Smart’s life, one that passed from wealth and security through a grand
passion, poverty, incredible hardships, isolation, and late-blooming
literary fame. A biographer must be able to empathize with the
subject’s experience, and this study shows that Sullivan has been able
to do this.

Smart (1913-1985), a native of Ottawa who spent most of her adult life
in England, is remembered primarily for two brief “novels” and for
her extraordinary love affair with British poet George Barker. Her books
of poetic prose (neither is really a novel) are By Grand Central Station
I Sat Down and Wept (1945, reprinted several times since) and The
Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals (1978). After 1966, the former made
Smart a cult figure.

Sullivan portrays her subject’s early life in Ottawa with a wealthy
father whom Smart adored and a manipulative mother, always a powerful
force in Elizabeth’s life: “control was always the issue.”
Smart’s love of language began early, as her journals show. But the
Canada of her youth was stony ground for writers, especially women.
Smart’s resulting lack of confidence is not surprising.

Smart was a romantic who believed that a heroic love would reveal her
true self. She found a suitable object for such passion in Barker
because of his verse, discovered in a London bookstore in 1937. For
years, Smart trusted that Barker intended to divorce his wife and marry
her. This never happened. He seems to have been adept at deceiving both
women and, basically, misogynist. With or without marriage, Smart felt
compelled to have children by Barker, four in all. Sullivan’s analysis
of this obsession helps to clarify it.

By Heart is a solid and sensitive tribute to an important writer and an
exceptional woman. Smart, a brilliant wordsmith, was wise and loving to
a fault. Hers was essentially a woman’s wisdom, as Sullivan’s
readers will understand.