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Muriel Spark is counted among the best novelists of the twentieth century. She produced 22 novels, several collections of poetry, children's books, literary criticism, essays, and plays. Her travels - she lived in Zimbabwe, London, New York, Rome, and Tuscany - informed her writing, and she frequently used her own life experience as inspiration in her work.
Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in February 1918. She was educated at the James Gillespie's High School for Girls. This is where she first tried her hand at poetry, and her poems frequently appeared in the school magazine. The school served as the model for the Marcia Blaine School we encounter in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
After leaving school, she took a précis-writing course at the Heriot-Watt College, and she would credit this for her compact prose style (“I love economical prose, and would always try to find the briefest way to express a meaning”, she said).
From an early age, Spark liked to people-watch. “I was fascinated from the earliest age I can remember, by how people arranged themselves….I can’t remember a time when I was not a person-watcher, a behaviorist. I was also an avid listener.” She also realized while still a child, from watching her parents and other adults around her, that people tend to behave one way in public and another way in private.
Spark revealed that her first interest in literature - and what remained an enduring inspiration to her - was reading the Scottish border ballads, in the form of the 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border', an anthology of folk ballads edited by Sir Walter Scott. These ballads were never short on emotion - anger, fear, pity, revenge, passion - and yet they were unsentimental. She believed that “sentimentality excludes other and more profound emotions, And in the end it can be very false.’ And this to us is seems a perfect description of Spark's own writing. There is humour, betrayal, deceit, crime, darkness, bleakness, but never sentimentality.
In 1937, nineteen year old Muriel travelled to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to marry Sydney Oswald Spark. After eight years, and the end of her marriage which was unhappy for the most part, she made her way to London in 1944. But her time in Africa did inspire her writing, and a short story she wrote titled “The Seraph and the Zambesi” would go on to be a turning point for her. She submitted it to The Observer newspaper’s short fiction competition and it won first prize, beating 6,700 other entrants. This was the “spark” (sorry! you had to know it was coming) she needed to write more fiction.
In 1953 Spark was on a medication called Dexedrine, and the hallucinations she experienced from this became material for her first novel The Comforters, published in 1957, a work of meta fiction before ‘meta fiction’ was possibly a term. In this novel, Caroline Rose, a recent convert to Catholicism, starts hearing a typewriter clacking away and a voice narrating her life in the past tense. She believes that she is a character in the book we are reading, which she is. Around this runs a subplot about her boyfriend's elderly grandmother and a diamond-smuggling ring. The novel’s success allowed Spark to give up her editorial job and to take up writing full time.
From 1957 she wrote constantly and efficiently, finishing almost a novel a year until the mid-1970s.
Here’s a quick roundup of some of her other novels on our shelves:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). This is her most famous work. It found its way into multiple theatre adaptations as well as a film adaptation that won Maggie Smith an Academy Award. This taut novel tells the story of Jean Brodie, an unusual and charismatic teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s. Miss Brodie selects a set of six pupils (her “creme de la creme” as she calls them) and lavishes her time on them, working to shape them in her own image. Lessons with Miss Brodie do not adhere to the school’s approved curriculum, instead she shares confidences about her love affairs, her holidays, her views on art, religion, philosophy. We learn early on in the novel that she will eventually be betrayed by one of her girls, who comes to see in Miss Brodie’s influence the same kind of perverse power a fascist leader might wield - like Mussolini, for whom Miss Brodie openly expresses admiration. The girl’s complaint to the principal leads to Jean Brodie’s forced early retirement. The character of Jean Brodie was modeled on Spark’s own school teacher Christina Kay, although the fictional version was more unconventional. Muriel and her friend Frances were the chosen students that Kay spent time with outside the classroom, taking them to galleries, museums, the cinema, and the ballet. She made such an impression on young Muriel - she said Kay was to her “a character in search of an author” - that she reproduced some of Kay’s memorable utterances in the novel.
Memento Mori (1959). An anonymous caller telephones the elderly Dame Lettie Colston and her social circle with a message: remember you must die. The recipients, in their seventies and eighties, have no wish to be reminded of their own mortality. Old secrets come tumbling out, there is betrayal, deception, blackmail. A retired inspector is consulted, but the novel is not a typical detective story.
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). This is the odd one out - the only long novel Spark ever wrote. But it won accolades, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The novel is set in a Jerusalem divided between Israel and Jordan, where the Mandelbaum Gate is the only crossing point, during the Eichmann trial. Barbara Vaughan is an English schoolmistress, a Catholic with a Jewish mother, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land; she is determined to cross into Jordan to see the biblical sites and to join her fiancé Harry Clegg, an archaeologist working at Qumran. The crossing is dangerous but she goes anyway, and disappears. This novel is also auto-biographical in part, as Spark herself traveled to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial and is, like Barbara, half-Jewish.
The Public Image (1968). Annabel Christopher is a modestly talented English actress in Rome whose career is the result of good fortune and a meticulously manufactured image. Her husband Frederick, an unsuccessful screenwriter despises both this image and her inexplicable success. When his resentment boils over, he plots an elaborate form of revenge. Frederick's shocking act throws Annabel’s carefully cultivated persona and her acting future into peril. What can she do to save herself?
Territorial Rights (1979). Venice in the off season - scandal, blackmail, regicide. Robert, an art history student arrives to escape one romantic entanglement and finds himself in new ones, including with a Bulgarian defector and artist searching for her father's grave. His father is also in town with a mistress; his mother, back in England, has put a detective on the case. The guesthouse where everyone converges has a body buried in the garden.
Loitering with Intent (1981). Set in London, 1949–50. Fleur Talbot, while finishing work on her first novel, takes a secretarial job with Sir Quentin Oliver's Autobiographical Association, a circle of eccentrics writing memoirs that are to be sealed for seventy years until everyone named in them is safely dead. Fleur cheerfully uses her imagination to improve the dull ones. Then Sir Quentin, whom she calls a "psychological Jack the Ripper”, steals her manuscript, and the Association's members begin living out scenes she has already written.
A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Spark drew on her own experience of London’s bed-sits and the publishing world in this novel, narrated by an older Mrs Hawkins, who is recalling her youth in the 1950s, when she was a young war widow, working in publishing and lodging in a South Kensington boarding house. She sabotages her own career in publishing by refusing to retract an insult aimed at a writer she considers a hack, but who has powerful friends.
Symposium (1990). We have five couples at a London dinner party, and as they eat and converse, we are provided with flashbacks into each guest's history. Spark discloses in the opening pages that one guest who is expected to drop in late - a rich widow and mother of one of the guests - is being murdered as the dinner is underway. Suspicion lands on her new daughter-in-law, a young woman who seems to have an unsettling history of proximity to sudden and suspicious deaths.
Muriel Spark died in Florence, aged 88, in April 2006. Her 23rd novel remained unfinished.
Our Sources for this post include:
1. Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark by James Bailey
2. The National Library of Scotland - https://www.nls.uk/collections/stories/literature-and-poetry/muriel-spark-people-watcher-traveller-novelist/
3. thebookerprizes.com