When Elizabeth Smart's cottage in Flixton was sold, an unsuspected mass of letters, diaries, scrapbooks and MSS was discovered. This book has been compiled by some of Elizabeth's friends in an effort to imply the autobiography that she did not live to write.
Smart sold her first poem -- for a dollar -- at the age of 10. The following year, confined by illness to bed for 6 months, she bagan what was to be a lifelong habit of "squeezing bits of the day into notebooks." These notebooks provided the raw material from which she worked -- ideas, thoughts, feelings, observations, story ideas and digressions.
[First two paragraphs of the introduction]
