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.
At her selective convent school school Carmel McBain is thrown closely together with Karina (child of East European immigrant parents), because they are the only two children at the school from poor homes beyond its...
Literary responses
Hilary Mantel
HM
already features in critical surveys of the modern British novel, such as that by Nick Rennison
, 2004. A. S. Byatt
discusses her (among writers of both sexes including predecessors Elizabeth Bowen
and Muriel Spark
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...
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...
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
.
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.
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,...
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.
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...