Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity

by Kim Echlin

The author of "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" has long been seen as a woman determined by "Romantic" love. In this suggestive new look at the life of a fascinating writer, Kim Echlin shows that another - powerful - source of Smart's creativity was rooted in her fearless exploration of the female body and psyche - as daughter, lover of men and women, and single mother of four children fathered by a British poet. Women's creativity and relationships are the timeless preoccupation of Elizabeth Smart's writing. Echlin shows how Elizabeth Smart's determined embrace of her own unconventional experience in her art belongs to a literary tradition of writers who create female characters with a will toward individuality. To the last pages of Elizabeth Smart's lifelong diaries, she never stopped challenging herself to stop doubting, to live and speak her truth, even though it put her on the margins throughout her life. Echlin brings new material to bear on this reflection, including a hundred interviews with family, friends and work colleagues, as well as never before seen letters in which Smart reflects on birth and female creativity. She highlights Smart's unwavering commitment to writing in a voice and aesthetic form that reflects authentic female creativity.

237 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Award-winning author Kim Echlin lives in Toronto. She is the author of Elephant Winter and Dagmar’s Daughter, and her third novel, The Disappeared, was short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction. She has translated a collection of poetry about the goddess Inanna, the earliest written poetry in the world. Her new novel, Speak, Silence is coming out in March 2021.

Kim has lived and worked around the world. She has been a documentary producer at the CBC and currently teaches creative writing.

Reviews

[David]

I enjoyed reading this one, including finding out a few more details about Elizabeth Smart's life that had overlapped with my own, but of which I was previously unaware. The subtitle including "A Fugue Essay" is interesting. This is not a conventional biography. Sometimes it seems to lean towards personal bias. Generally speaking, though, that personal bias is entirely in favour of the subject and opposes the gender-based bias that Smart seemingly felt most of her life. It is a book about a woman by a woman about being women. Logically, sometimes, I don't get it. Meanwhile, I am continuing with Smart and memoirs of Smart.

[Three O'Clock Press]

The author of "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" has long been seen as a woman determined by "Romantic" love. In this suggestive new look at the life of a fascinating writer, Kim Echlin shows that another - powerful - source of Smart's creativity was rooted in her fearless exploration of the female body and psyche - as daughter, lover of men and women, and single mother of four children fathered by a British poet. Women's creativity and relationships are the timeless preoccupation of Elizabeth Smart's writing. Echlin shows how Elizabeth Smart's determined embrace of her own unconventional experience in her art belongs to a literary tradition of writers who create female characters with a will toward individuality. To the last pages of Elizabeth Smart's lifelong diaries, she never stopped challenging herself to stop doubting, to live and speak her truth, even though it put her on the margins throughout her life. Echlin brings new material to bear on this reflection, including a hundred interviews with family, friends and work colleagues, as well as never before seen letters in which Smart reflects on birth and female creativity. She highlights Smart's unwavering commitment to writing in a voice and aesthetic form that reflects authentic female creativity.