Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Muriel Spark
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Standard Name: Spark, Muriel
Birth Name: Muriel Sarah Camberg
Nickname: Sparklet
Married Name: Muriel Sarah Spark
Pseudonym: Aquarius
The publishing career of MS
spanned the later twentieth century, extending beyond each end of that fifty-year period. She began writing as a poet, and went on to short fiction, literary criticism, biography, journalism, and drama. Having come to prose fiction through narrative poetry, she only gradually came to take the novel genre seriously.
She is, however, best known for her twenty-three novels, and especially for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961. She experimented with the longer novel, but her critical and commercial success came with shorter works. She said she preferred minor novels, in which she could explore precisely defined subjects within clear formal boundaries.
In summer 1959 she and her husband were in Ferlach in southern Austria, on a lake near the border with Yugoslavia, in order to have cheap and uninterrupted working time. In the evenings...
Textual Production
Kathleen Nott
The Hand and Flower Press
, run by Marx from 1940 until 1966, began with limited editions of books by admired authors, and moved on to works, especially poetry, by largely unpublished writers, including...
Textual Production
Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Textual Production
Ali Smith
With her background in academia and her work reviewing fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian, AS
has produced an impressive amount of literary criticism. She has written critical introductions for reissues of work...
Textual Production
Jackie Kay
JK
was one of twenty Scottish authors invited to contribute a monologue to a collaborative work entitled Dear Scotland, which was first performed by the Scottish National Theatre
on 24 April 2014 as a...
Textual Features
Michèle Roberts
In her early story Une Glossaire (in English A Glossary, collected in During Mother's Absence), MRwrites about her French childhood under headings such as Beurre, Moisson, and Grandpere.
Wilkinson, Margaret. “The Blank Page”. Mslexia, No. 9, p. 13.
Mr. Scobie's Riddle is a black comedy set in a nursing home: one of EJ
's only two novels to have a male narrator-protagonist. Its ironically humorous tone salvages a story whose dark topic had...
Textual Features
Caroline Blackwood
Critic Val Warner
called CB
a unique voice in twentieth-century British fiction.
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research.
The year following her Selected Poems, CAD
won the Lannan Literary Award in the USA, and her work was included in the second volume of Penguin Modern Poets. A decade after that,...
Reception
Rumer Godden
She was awarded an OBE in 1993 (at the same time that Muriel Spark
was made a Dame).
Chisholm, Anne. Rumer Godden, A Storyteller’s Life. Pan Books.
Muriel Spark
vigorously promoted the work of the Brontës in the mid twentieth century, and Winifred Gérin
was another important early biographer. Later in the century, J. Hillis Miller
provided an influential deconstructive reading of...
Publishing
Evelyn Waugh
Throughout his career EW
published essays and reviews. The latter include a warm and thoughtful welcome in The Spectator for Muriel Spark
's The Comforters, 1957, and he went on to provide quotable phrases...
Author summary
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
, writing in the later twentieth century, was called the most comical and disturbing writer working in Australia today.
Bird, Delys, and Brenda Walker, editors. Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Angus and Robertson.
back-cover
The author of some fifteen novels as well as plays, poetry, and short stories...
Timeline
1797: James Gillespie, Edinburgh bachelor and self-made...
Building item
1797
James Gillespie
, Edinburgh bachelor and self-made snuff merchant, left money at his death to found a day school for poor boys, later for boys and girls.
21 February 1924: The first issue appeared of the New Yorker...
Writing climate item
21 February 1924
The first issue appeared of the New Yorkermagazine (still going strong in the twenty-first century).
Borne Back Daily. http://borneback.com/ .
21 February 2011
1962: Publisher John Calder and writer's widow...
Writing climate item
1962
Publisher John Calder
and writer's widow Sonia Orwell
together organised at Edinburgh the first, highly successful Writers' Conference.
30 May 1967: Colonel Emeka Ojukwu of Eastern Nigeria made...
National or international item
30 May 1967
Colonel Emeka Ojukwu
of Eastern Nigeria made a unilateral declaration of independence on the part of the Ibo people, which set up the Republic of Biafra.
April 2005: The poet Fiona Sampson took up the position...
Writing climate item
April 2005
The poet Fiona Sampson
took up the position of editor of Poetry Review (published by the Poetry Society
)—the first woman to hold this post since Muriel Spark
more than forty years before.
8 May 2008: Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago...