Long neglected by Canadian critics, Elizabeth Smart suffered the fate of the expatriate whose literary career was interrupted and taken up again many years after her first publication. That volume. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), was itself an anomaly in terms of Canadian writing at the time. The rise of Canadian interest in the techniques of experimental fiction associated with modernism has, together with the publication of Smart's second novel in the late 1970s, produced a context within which her work may be seen and understood as a significant contribution to the small body of Canadian narratives in the lyrical mode.

Elizabeth Smart was born into the bourgeois family of Russel S. Smart, a barrister, and Emma Louise Parr Smart on 27 December 1913. She attended Hatfield Hall, a private school, and was brought up in a family which valued its place in the social circle...