The passion with which Elizabeth Smart lived and loved gave rise to one of the most intense literary love affairs of the 20th century and the power and innovation of her writing have won her work ever-increasing praise and recognition. The account of her dramatic romance with the poet George Barker, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, is now acclaimed as a modern classic. Opening in the mid-Forties at the height of her affair with Barker, this book, the second and final volume of Smart's diaries, charts her departure from Canada into self-imposed exile in London, the birth of her four children, and her repeated, half-hearted attempts to leave Barker. When By Grand Central Station was burned and censored in Canada by her mother, Elizabeth threw herself into the social whirl of London in the Fifties and Sixties, only to return to writing critically-acclaimed novels and poetry in the Seventies and Eighties.