The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals - Softcover

Smart, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0008155747 ISBN 13: 9780008155742

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2015

Synopsis

First published in 1978, and widely considered to be the sequel to her masterpiece ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’, this remarkable book further established Smart’s reputation as a brave and inspirational writer.

A still beautiful woman, 31 years old with four children by a faithless lover, cannot break the habit of expectation. She must learn to submit to the cold, bare, unglamorous tenets of reality – the untenable position of love. She must learn to deflect Grand Passion into an acceptance of the rogues and rascals with their radiant faces, who buy her a bitter with borrowed cash. Out of a passionate youth, through pain and harsh revelation, she has attained a maturity – a certain knowledge that the cost of rapture is high and that there is no looking back.

Hers is a voice that distils a woman’s determination for survival – a voice that rises up from everyday life, from the bus queue, the Underground, the pub – and in Elizabeth Smart’s hand is wrought into something magnificent.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Smart was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1913. She was educated at private schools in Canada and, for a year, at King's College, University of London. Her landmark work, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept was published in 1945. After the war she supported herself and her family through journalism and advertising work. In 1963 she became literary and associate editor of Queen magazine but subsequently dropped out of the literary scene to live quietly in a remote part of Suffolk. She died in 1986.

From Publishers Weekly

Smart's much-admired 1945 novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, was inspired by her longtime love affair with poet George Barker. This 1978 novel picks up where that earlier book left off, with the narrator, like Smart, meditating on the leavings of love?among them four children. It is a despairing look at life by a woman whose chance at love has come and gone, and though very little happens in the way of plot, the prose is gorgeous. Smart's narrative calls to mind some of the greatest modernists, as when her narrator, overwhelmed by the trivialities of her mundane life as a mother, sinks into a paralysis reminiscent of that of Eliot's Prufrock. "After I had given birth to my first child, I felt time and space come whorling back into the empty space where it had lain. And Einsteinian demons came rushing to attack me with the terrible nature of the naked truth. But now I sit in country kitchens, discussing the minor discomforts of childbirth, and the domestic details of love." This is a somewhat bitter meditation on love and loneliness, but Smart's poetic prose makes it a book of high literary merit.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0008155747
• ISBN 13: 9780008155742
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160