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.
Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable.
197
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.

Connections

Connections Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Travel Christine Brooke-Rose
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1966, began with limited editions of books by admired authors, and moved on to works, especially poetry, by largely unpublished writers, including...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.
13
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Textual Features Elizabeth Jolley
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.
65: 38
A press handout on Nancy Schoenberger 's biography likens Blackwood's work to that of Edna O'Brien , Muriel Spark , Iris Murdoch
Textual Features Doris Lessing
Her topics range from cats to Sufism and censorship and from Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf to Anna Kavan and Muriel Spark .
Reception Carol Ann Duffy
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.
291
In 2010 a book of critical essays on RG appeared, edited by Lucy Le-Guilcher and Phyllis B. Lassner
Reception Emily Brontë
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.

1826: The Royal Society of Literature received...

Writing climate item

1826

The Royal Society of Literature received its charter; it had been founded several years previously.

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...

Women writers item

8 May 2008

Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago Modern Classics by re-issuing works by Barbara Pym , E. M. Delafield , Elizabeth Taylor , Jacqueline Susann , Muriel Spark , Helene Hanff , Zora Neale Hurston , and Angela Carter .

Texts

Spark, Muriel. A Far Cry from Kensington. Constable, 1988.
Brontë, Emily. A Selection of Poems by Emily Brontë. Editor Spark, Muriel, Grey Walls Press, 1952.
Spark, Muriel. Aiding and Abetting. Viking, 2000.
Spark, Muriel. All the Poems. Carcanet, 2004.
Spark, Muriel. Bang-Bang You’re Dead and Other Stories. Granada, 1982.
Spark, Muriel. Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Tower Bridge, 1951.
Spark, Muriel. Collected Poems I. Macmillan, 1967.
Spark, Muriel. Collected Stories I. Macmillan, 1967.
Spark, Muriel. Complete Poems. Carcanet Press, 2015.
Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable, 1992.
Spark, Muriel. Doctors of Philosophy. Macmillan, 1963.
Spark, Muriel, and Derek Stanford. Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work. Peter Owen, 1953.
Spark, Muriel. Going Up to Sotheby’s and Other Poems. Granada, 1982.
Spark, Muriel. John Masefield. Nevill, 1953.
Spark, Muriel, and Derek Stanford, editors. Letters of John Henry Newman: A Selection. Owen, 1957.
Spark, Muriel. Loitering with Intent. Bodley Head, 1981.
Spark, Muriel. Memento Mori. Macmillan, 1959.
Spark, Muriel. Memento Mori. Macmillan, 1966.
Spark, Muriel, and Derek Stanford, editors. My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Wingate, 1953.
Spark, Muriel. “My Conversion”. Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, edited by Joseph Hynes, G. K. Hall and Maxwell Macmillan, 1992, pp. 24-28.
Spark, Muriel. Not to Disturb. Macmillan, 1971.
Spark, Muriel. Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories. New Directions, 1997.
Spark, Muriel. Out of a Book. Millar and Burden, 1933.
Spark, Muriel. Reality and Dreams. Constable, 1996.
Spark, Muriel. Reality and Dreams. Penguin, 1997.