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).

For the next few years she lived the stimulating, bohemian, often harsh life of a modern poet in London, though she despised those literary circles which she felt to be self-serving and amateurish. Although she...

The close of MS 's erotic relationship with Howard Sergeant (with whom, however, her friendship continued for a while) coincided with a gradual movement towards Derek Stanford , a fellow-member of postwar London bohemia, who...

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...

In London in early 1963 she was horrified to hear that a publisher had accepted a book about her by Derek Stanford . The rushed and patchyMuriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study appeared...

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...

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...

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...

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 her first volume of short fiction, The Go-Away Bird with Other Stories, with a print-run of 2,500, dedicated to her former lover Derek Stanford .