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.
MW
's friend Caradoc Evans
(who called her the greatest living woman novelist and understood how hungry she was for success) recorded her envy of an unnamed countryside woman novelist who was savouring her own...
The prize went to P. H. Newby
's Something to Answer For, which according to Kermode years later was a compromise decision. Dame Rebecca didn't dislike it as much as nearly all the others...
Literary responses
Jeanette Winterson
Reviewers in the Washington Post Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Times Literary Supplement, the Scotsman, and The Times all acclaimed this novel; Muriel Spark
termed Winterson a fresh voice...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Spark, Muriel. The Very Fine Clock. Macmillan, 1968.
Spark, Muriel, and Derek Stanford, editors. Tribute to Wordsworth: A Miscellany of Opinion for the Centenary of the Poet’s Death. Wingate, 1950.