Elizabeht Smart was born in 1913 into one of the best known families in Ottawa, Canada. He was living in London, where he was studying piano, theater and painting, when one day in 1937 he entered a bookstore, found a book of poems by a certain George Barker and decided that this was the man of his life. It took him three years to meet Barker, who was already married but with whom he maintained the love relationship that this book narrates, and with whom he would have several children. After a few stormy years, Smart would definitely settle in England. It was not until 1978 that he was able to write again, that year he published another extraordinary text that Peripheral will soon publish: The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. He died in 1986.