Derek Stanford

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 .

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

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.

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 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).

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...