By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Suggesting a set of performance-based tasks to evaluate. Acknowledging the advantages that these activities provide, this work aims at They also provide foreign language teachers with opportunities to challenge their students to use the language and therefore, assess the development of their skills. 'I doubt if there are half a dozen such masterpieces in the world.Performance-based tasks enable students’ to demonstrate their learning progress in authentic ways. to move the reader, and even to awe him.' - London Review of Books 'The emotion, the true and abject affliction, conics through. This short, powerful work had a profound influence on rue and was one of the factors that made me want to be a writer.' - Beryl Bainbridge

'Constructed as a single, sustained climax, it is like a cry of ecstasy which, without changing volume or pitch, becomes a cry of agony.' - Spectator 'Explores a passion between a man and two women, one of them his wife - a love both despairing and triumphant upon which the reader may gaze, awed, appalled, or even, perhaps, envious.' - The Times And he or she recognizes an emotion essential and permanent to us.' - Michael Ondaatje

'At some point every good reader comes across By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. 'Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightening. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book is now widely identified as a classic work of poetic prose which, seven decades later, has retained all of its searing poignancy, beauty and power of impact. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written – ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’.

Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker’s impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife from Japan, where he was teaching, to join her in the United States.

One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker – and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Elizabeth Smart’s passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as ‘Like MADAME BOVARY blasted by lightning.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart