| Rhymes of Passion; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 13 2013, 01:06 PM (605 Views) | |
| becky sharp | Mar 13 2013, 01:06 PM Post #1 |
|
I love the title of this book but hate that the author of it wilfully neglected her children to chase the object of her affections..... Laura Barton tells the story of the passionate, obsessive love affair that inspired the extraordinary poetic novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Elizabeth Smart chanced across a book of poems by George Barker in a Charing Cross Road bookshop in 1939. It intoxicated her so much that she decided to marry him there and then, whoever he was. She tracked him down in Japan and embarked on an affair that would last for two decades and which led to Smart bearing four of Barker's 15 children. She would also produce the passionate prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept detailing the affair. It was an underground success when it was published in the 1940s but became both celebrated and reviled by the generation of feminists in the late 1960s. Some might say Smart is an appalling role model for women, as she seemed utterly submissive to Barker. She was a single working mother of four in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. She moved to Europe in wartime and went on to become the highest paid copywriter in London. In many ways she was ahead of her time. In this programme, Laura Barton discovers the real story behind By Grand Central Station... -- a story of deceit and disappointment, but also, overridingly, of intense and passionate love. Featuring Christopher Barker, Elspeth Barker, Sebastian Barker, Robert Fraser, Rosemary Sullivan and Fay Weldon. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r5g2w I read this on Wiki... When the book was reissued in the late 1960s, novelist Angela Carter praised the novel in a Guardian review as “like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning” but later wrote privately to her friend, critic Lorna Sage, that one of her motivations for founding the feminist press Virago was "the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT[sic], exquisite prose though it might contain. (BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.)"[1] I found this an interesting article from one of Elisabeth Smart's sons. Here, Christopher Barker recounts the tortured and tempestuous relationship between his parents, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/20/poetry.features |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · The Choice Is Yours · Next Topic » |






12:16 AM Jul 11