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.

This book offers an authoritative overview of the broad and complex terrain of feminist theorising concerning the relationship between literature and theology as it has developed over the past several decades. It provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the significance of women's literature in the development of feminist theology and offers a critique of the variety of reading practices currently employed by religious feminists. As well as illuminating current reading strategies the work argues that it is now appropriate for feminists to develop new ways of reading the divine in women’s writing. Drawing upon the pioneering work of Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray the work sets out a new framework for feminist religious reading that is both creative and challenging and which will be of interest both to scholars and students in this area. Through its artful and compelling feminist reconsiderations, the book makes a refreshing and significant contribution to the general field known as literature and theology.

Toronto-based scholar Podnieks analyzes the diaries based on both the published volumes and the unpublished manuscripts. Her work on the manuscripts focuses on their physical qualities, exploring how the women designed their diaries as books with title pages, prefaces, indexes, illustrations, and other features and how elements such as handwriting, edited words and phrases, or torn-out pages illuminate facets of self-representation and self-preservation. c. Book News Inc.