Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Muriel Spark
-
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.
Glendinning writes: She is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link that connects Virginia Woolf
with Iris Murdoch
and Muriel Spark
.
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf.
xv
Elizabeth Jenkins
characteristically remarked that as Britain's leading woman of letters...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Christine Brooke-Rose
The book was not well received, because of what was felt to be its misanthropic spleen.
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press.
42
It was roughly treated, for instance, on a tv discussion programme. CBR
remained dissatisfied with her first...
Material Conditions of Writing
Christine Brooke-Rose
The revision of this novel was done partly at the home of Muriel Spark
and Penelope Jardine
in Tuscany. Spark, who had just met Brooke-Rose again after years out of touch, helped her search...
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State University Press.
42
also worked in intelligence during the war. Brooke-Rose later helped her by looking over and correcting French translations of Spark's works. Another early friend...
Leisure and Society
Ivy Compton-Burnett
ICB
was scathing about the work of some younger novelists, like Iris Murdoch
and Muriel Spark
(though she took Murdoch more seriously than Spark).
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen.
86, 93-4
In her years alone she became very fond of...
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,...
Occupation
Rumer Godden
While living in Highgate RG
took to organizing readings: at Foyles
bookshop, promoting young poets; at Kenwood House; and for the Arts Council
, where she spent two years on the Poetry Panel...
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.
Personal friends who were Catholics or converted to that faith during the course of their friendships with Greene included Muriel Spark
, Antonia White
and the future writer Mary Wesley
.
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...
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...
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...