Derek Stanford

She was assisted during her illness (at the behest of Derek Stanford ) by many friends, and treated without fees by her doctor, also an old friend. Throughout her convalescence she was supported by...

MS says she wrote to combat misinformation: So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written since I became well known, that I felt it time to put the record...

MS approached the process of writing in a manner characteristically savouring of magical ritual. She wrote in longhand, seldom revising, and never used a pen anyone else had touched. Her notebooks were of a particular...

MS published Tribute to Wordsworth : A Miscellany of Opinion for the Centenary of the Poet's Death, a work on Wordsworth's reception in which she dealt with the twentieth century and Derek Stanford with the nineteenth.

MS published My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which she edited together with Derek Stanford .

MS and Derek Stanford published their joint study Emily Brontë : Her Life and Work, after she had had to wait for his part of the venture, which came in late.

MS edited with Derek StanfordLetters of John Henry Newman : A Selection (he dealing with Newman as an Anglican, she with Newman as a Catholic).

Her recently discarded boyfriend, Howard Sergeant , annoyed her by planning a simultaneous, rival Wordsworth book. Tribute to Wordsworth was published by André Deutsch , who was then working for Allan Wingate . MS

This was her last book of non-fiction. Her attempt to help Derek Stanford by arranging with Macmillan that they publish a second book on Newman came to nothing. He suffered a nervous breakdown, and had...

MS 's successive jobs in journalism (life, in effect, in modern Grub Street) provided a constant opportunity, and need, to write short pieces of many different types. While working for Argentor she wrote an article...

With this book Spark reverted to a shorter format, as close to novella as novel form. Critic Norman Page , however, perceived a crucial difference between the serene and jaunty short novels which preceded The...

This novel is set in the years 1954-5, with an epilogue which brings the characters thirty years onwards. The narrator, Nancy Hawkins, a young war widow, lives in a boarding-house in a downmarket area of...

Manuscripts of Spark's literary works and letters have been in great demand. She accused American dealer Lew D. Feldman of trying to extort money from her in exchange for her own letters to Derek Stanford

Spark was horrified when Derek Stanford , her former friend and collaborator, published a book about her in September 1963: Muriel Spark, a Biographical and Critical Study, which she later called packed with factual...

MS began her career as a novelist in illness and under financial stress. In 1954, Macmillan , who were looking for promising new writers, invited her to write a novel. Although ill and unable to...