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 descending Author name Excerpt
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...
Occupation Rebecca West
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...
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...
Author summary Hilary Mantel
The author of twelve novels (ranging from political thrillers through social satire, comedy of manners, and near-gothic), still at the height of her career, HM has been likened to Muriel Spark or Edna O'Brien for...
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...
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...
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...
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
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 .
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 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...

Timeline

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Texts

Spark, Muriel. Robinson. Macmillan, 1958.
Spark, Muriel. Robinson. Penguin, 1964.
Spark, Muriel. Symposium. Constable, 1990.
Spark, Muriel. Territorial Rights. Macmillan, 1979.
Spark, Muriel. The Abbess of Crewe. Macmillan, 1974.
Spark, Muriel. The Bachelors. Macmillan, 1960.
Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Macmillan, 1960.
Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Macmillan, 1965.
Spark, Muriel, editor. The Brontë Letters. Nevill, 1954.
Spark, Muriel. The Comforters. Macmillan, 1957.
Spark, Muriel. The Driver’s Seat. Macmillan, 1970.
Spark, Muriel. The Fanfarlo and Other Verse. Hand and Flower Press, 1952.
Spark, Muriel. The French Window. Macmillan, 1970.
Spark, Muriel. The Girls of Slender Means. Macmillan, 1963.
Spark, Muriel. The Go-Away Bird with Other Stories. Macmillan, 1958.
Spark, Muriel. The Hothouse by the East River. Macmillan, 1973.
Spark, Muriel. The Hothouse by the East River. Penguin, 1975.
Spark, Muriel. The Mandelbaum Gate. Macmillan, 1965.
Spark, Muriel. The Only Problem. First Edition Society, Franklin Library, 1984.
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Macmillan, 1961.
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. J. B. Lippincott, 1962.
Spark, Muriel. The Public Image. Macmillan, 1968.
Spark, Muriel. “The Seraph and the Zambesi”. The Observer Prize Stories: The Seraph and the Zambesi, and Twenty Others, Observer, 1952, pp. 1-12.
Spark, Muriel. The Stories of Muriel Spark. Dutton, 1985.
Spark, Muriel. The Takeover. Macmillan, 1976.