Muriel Spark

For more information on Dame Muriel Spark, visit Britannica.com.

Muriel Sarah Spark (born 1918) wrote biography, literary criticism, poetry, and fiction, including the novel that was considered her masterpiece, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Born in Edinburgh on February 1, 1918, Muriel Spark worked in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office in 1944-1945, was the general secretary of the Poetry Society from 1947 to 1949, and served as the editor of Poetry Review in 1949. She was the founder of the literary magazine Forum and worked as a part-time editor for Peter Owen Ltd.

In the early 1950s Spark published her first poetry collection, The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952), and built a solid reputation as a biographer with Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951); Emily Bronte: Her Life and Work (1953); and John Masefield (1953). She also edited A Collection of Poems by Emily Bronte (1952), My Best Mary: The Letters of Mary Shelley (1954), and, most important, Letters of John Henry Newman (1957).

While working in these areas of nonfiction, Spark was undergoing a crisis of faith and was strongly influenced by the writings of Newman, the 19th-century Anglican clergyman who became a convert to Roman Catholicism and eventually a cardinal in that faith. While she was dealing with her crisis, she received financial and psychological assistance from Graham Greene, also a Roman Catholic convert, and was eventually converted herself, a move that had significant influence on her novels.

Spark published the first of those novels, The Comforters, in 1957 and followed that with Robinson in 1958, the same year she authored her first short-story collection, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories. In this same period she began writing radio plays, with The Party Through the Wall in 1957, The Interview in 1958, and The Dry River Bed in 1959.

It was in 1959 that Spark had her first major success, Memento Mori, with some critics comparing her to Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh. She followed this with The Ballad of Peckham Rye in 1960, writing a radio play based on the novel that same year; The Bachelors, also in 1960; and Voices at Play in 1961, likewise turned into a radio play.

In 1961 she also published the novel generally regarded as her masterwork, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, subsequently made into a play, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in the years 1966-1968; a film in 1969; and a six-part adaptation for television, another transatlantic success, in 1978 and 1979. This was the portrait of a middle-aged teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s who has gathered around her a coterie of five girls, "The Brodie Set." Jean Brodie was one of those delightful eccentrics, common in English fiction, who walked a tightrope over the abyss of caricature but never tumbled in. She saw her task as "putting old heads on young shoulders" and told her disciples that they were the créme de la créme. In 1939 she was forced to retire on the grounds that she has been teaching fascism, the accusation made by the girl who eventually became a nun and defended herself against charges of betrayal by observing that "It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due." Critic George Stade probably best defined Spark's attitude toward Jean Brodie by pointing out that the novel embodied "the traditional moral wisdom that, if you are not part of something larger than yourself, you are nothing."

In 1962 Spark's sole venture into theater, Doctors of Philosophy, was presented in London and was not a resounding success. She returned to fiction and wrote The Girls of Slender Means (1963); The Mandelbaum Gate (1965); Collected Stories I (1967); The Public Image (1968); The Very Fine Clock (1968), her only work for juveniles; The Driver's Seat (1970); Not To Disturb (1971); and The Hothouse by the East River (1973).

Also in 1973 Sharp published another outstanding novel, The Abbess of Crewe, a work alive with paradox. To win election as abbess, the protagonist, Sister Gertrude, studied Machiavelli; once in charge, she combined an extreme conservatism in religious matters with the installation of electronic devices in the abbey and enlisted the aid of two Jesuit priests in exposing the affair between Sister Felicity and a young Jesuit. Released from the abbey, Sister Gertrude roamed the Third World like a loose cannon, indulging in such projects as mediating a war between a tribe of cannibals and a tribe of vegetarians. The novel was filmed in 1976 under the title Nasty Habits.

Subsequently there came the novels The Takeover (1976); Territorial Rights (1979); Loitering with Intent (1981); A Far Cry from Kensington (1987); The Only Problem (1988); Symposium (1990); Reality and Dreams (1997); and two collections of short stories, Bang-Bang You're Dead and Other Stories (1982) and The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985). In 1992, she published Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography.

Her twentieth novel, Reality and Dreams explored the boundaries and connections between realities and dreams in a story about a dream-driven film director who feels and seeks to be Godlike in his work, a theme which illustrated the aptness of critic Frank Kermode's insight that in Spark's novels portrayed a connection between fiction and the world, and between the creation of the novelist and the creation of God.

Much of the criticism about Spark's work focused on the extent to which her Catholicism influenced her writing; that is, was she a Catholic novelist or a novelist who was incidentally a Catholic? The former view was upheld by American critic Granville Hicks, who termed her "a gloomy Catholic, like Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor, more concerned with the evil of man than the goodness of God." J.D. Enright, on the other hand, felt that, unlike Paul Claudel or François Mauriac or Graham Greene, she had no interest in force-feeding Catholicism to her readers. Religion aside, Duncan Fallowell summed up her fiction in this way: "She is the master, and sometimes mistress, of an attractive, cynical worldliness which is not shallow." And that observation probably best encapsulated British critical opinion, which has been generally kind, if not generous, to her work for four decades.

In 1993, Spark was made Dame Muriel Spark, Order of the British Empire.

Further Reading

Obviously Spark's 1992 autobiography was essential reading. Otherwise, studies of her and her work abound. The best overview can be found in Joseph Hynes' Critical Essays on Muriel Spark (1992). There were about a dozen volumes by individual authors (some of the critics included in Hynes' collection). The most recent were the six works, all titled Muriel Spark, by Peter Kemp (1974); Allan Massie (1979); Velma B. Richmond (1984); Alan N. Bold (1986); Dorothea Walker (1988); and Page Norman (1990).

Quotes:

"If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs."

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion."

"Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield."

"Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life."

"I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third."

"One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full."

See more famous quotes by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark
Born	February 1, 1918(1918-02-01) Edinburgh, Scotland,
Died	April 13, 2006 (aged 88) Civitella della Chiana[citation needed], Tuscany, Italy
Occupation	novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist
Notable work(s)	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Mandelbaum Gate The Driver's Seat

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE (February 1, 1918 – April 13, 2006) was an award-winning Scottish novelist.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Writing career 1.3 Relationship with her son 2 Bibliography 2.1 Novels 2.2 Other works 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Early life

She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, to a Jewish father and an English^[1] (and Anglican) mother, and was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls. In 1934–35 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.^[2]

On 3 September 1937, she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was a manic depressive prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel had left Sidney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in 1944 and worked in intelligence during World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to set up home in England, but Robin returned to Britain with his father later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.^[3][4][5][6]

Writing career

Spark began writing seriously after the war, under her married name, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947, she became editor of the Poetry Review. In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do."^[7] In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing: "I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know — but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…" Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision.

Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957. It featured several references to Catholicism and conversion to Catholicism, although its main theme revolved around a young woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) was more successful. Spark displayed originality of subject and tone, making extensive use of flashforwards. It is clear that James Gillespie's High School was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in the novel.

After living in New York City for some years, she moved to Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine in 1968. In the early 1970s they settled in the Italian region of Tuscany and lived in the village of Civitella della Chiana, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumours of lesbian relationships^[8] from her time in New York onwards, although Spark and her friends denied their validity. She left her entire estate to Jardine, taking measures to ensure her son received nothing.^[9]

She refused to agree to the publication of a biography of her written by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine now has the right of approval to publication; and the book was published in July 2009. 'Front row' the Radio 4 arts programme on the 27th July 2009 Stannard was interviewed in the week of the publication of the biography. According to A. S. Byatt, "She was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer".^[10]

She received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent.^[11]

Relationship with her son

Spark and her son had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognized as Jewish. The devout Catholic Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.^[12] During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an enquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'.^[13][14][15]

Bibliography

Years link to corresponding "[year] in literature" article or, in the case of poetry, to the "[year] in poetry" article:

Novels

• The Comforters (1957)
• Robinson (1958)
• Memento Mori (1959)
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
• The Bachelors (1960)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
• The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
• The Public Image (1968) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Driver's Seat (1970)
• Not to Disturb (1971)
• The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
• The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
• The Takeover (1976)
• Territorial Rights (1979)
• Loitering with Intent (1981) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Only Problem (1984)
• A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
• Symposium (1991)
• Reality and Dreams (1996)
• Aiding and Abetting (2000)
• The Finishing School (2004)

Other works

• Tribute to Wordsworth (edited with Derek Stanford) (1950)
• Child of Light (a study of Mary Shelley) (1951)
• The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952)
• Selected Poems of Emily Brontë (1952)
• John Masefield (biography) (1953)
• Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (with Derek Stanford) (1953)
• My Best Mary (a selection of letters of Mary Shelley, edited with Derek Stanford) (1953)
• The Brontë letters (1954)
• Letters of John Henry Newman (edited with Derek Stanford) (1957)
• The Go-away Bird (short stories) (1958)
• Voices at Play (short stories and plays) (1961)
• Doctors of Philosophy (play) (1963)
• Collected Poems (1967)
• Collected Stories (1967)
• The Very Fine Clock (children's book, illustrations by Edward Gorey)(1968)
• Bang-bang You're Dead (short stories) (1982)
• Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems (1982)
• Curriculum Vitae (autobiography) (1992)
• Complete Short Stories (2001)
• All the Poems (2004)

References

1. ^ Guardian obituary.
2. ^ James Gillespies High School Official Site.
3. ^ Author Muriel Spark dies aged 88, BBC News , April 15, 2006, accompanied by an obituary.
4. ^ Dame Muriel Spark, 1918–2006: The novelist of identity, a May 1, 2006, Weekly Standard article
5. ^ Spark of Genius, a consideration of the author's work in the Winter 2006 Doublethink magazine.
6. ^ National Library of Scotland Biography
7. ^ Hal Hager, "About Muriel Spark," Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999) 141.
8. ^ How The New Yorker Made Muriel Spark's Reputation April 17, 2006.
9. ^ Muriel Spark leaves millions to woman friend rather than son.
10. ^ "Companion shelves 'unfair' Spark biography".
11. ^ "publisher = The Man Booker Prizes Muriel Spark". http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/authors/122 publisher = The Man Booker Prizes. 
12. ^ A far cry from Morningside 23 Apr 2006
13. ^ Book Festival readings 2004
14. ^ Bard Mitzvah July 2, 1998
15. ^ "Spark's son: I won't cash in on mum", The Scotsman, 14 May 2006.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Muriel Spark

• About "The Black Madonna" Interpretations of and more background information on the short story.
• Jewish Chronicle, March 13 1998, page 1, "Discovered: a lost chapter in L'chaim of Miss Jean Brodie"
• Guardian obituary
• "Chrysalis": a poem by Muriel Spark from TLS, January 17 2008.
• Archival material relating to Muriel Spark listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• The Muriel Spark Papers at Washington University in St. Louis
• Muriel Spark fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections

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