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 Author name Sort descending Excerpt
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
Literary responses Elizabeth Bowen
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...
Friends, Associates Christine Brooke-Rose
Muriel Spark , a very old friend of CBR ,
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...
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...
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.
291
In 2010 a book of critical essays on RG appeared, edited by Lucy Le-Guilcher and Phyllis B. Lassner
Friends, Associates Graham Greene
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 .
Textual Features Germaine Greer
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...
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.

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.