MURIEL

SPARK - LIFE AND WORKS

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE, lived from 1 February 1918 to 13 April 2006. She was a novelist, poet and non-
fiction author. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our Historical Timeline.



Muriel Sarah Camberg was born in Edinburgh. Her father was an engineer and her mother a music teacher.
She was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls, and in 1934-1935 she took a course in
"Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She then worked as an English
teacher and as a secretary. One of her teachers at James Gillespie's High School was Christina Kay, who
would later become the model for the main character in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

In 1937 Muriel married Sidney Oswald Spark, and shortly afterwards they moved together to Rhodesia,
now called Zimbabwe, where he had secured a job as a teacher. They had a son, Robin, in 1938, by which
time, Muriel had discovered her husband was a manic depressive. Muriel left her husband and son to
return to the UK where, from 1944, she worked in British Intelligence. Spark later said it had been her
intention to establish a family home in Britain, but her husband returned separately and their son was
brought up by Muriel's parents in Edinburgh.

After the Second World War, Muriel began writing under her married name, which she felt was more
memorable than her maiden name. Her first outings were into poetry and literary criticism, and in 1947 she
became editor of the Poetry Review. In 1954, following a breakdown, she converted to Roman Catholicism.
She later said this was an important step on her path towards becoming a novelist, and it was three years
later that her first novel, The Comforters, was published. Her fifth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
was published in 1961 to considerable acclaim and success. In all, Muriel Spark wrote 20 novels, concluding
with The Finishing School which was published in 2004. She also published 19 further works, ranging from
collections of poetry to short stories and biographical works about authors like Emily Brontë and John
Masefield.

Muriel spent part of the 1960s living in New York. She moved to Rome in 1967, where she met the artist
and sculptor Penelope Jardine. They settled in the village of Civitella della Chiana in Tuscany, where they
lived until Muriel's death in 2006. During her career, Dame Muriel Spark had won a string of literary
awards, and in 1993 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to
literature.



TERRITORIAL RIGHTS


Muriel Spark’s Territorial Rights is a wryly, perceptively funny novel which nevertheless has its sudden
darkly suggestive turns. By turns it is a story of pursuit, marital problems, tourist-watching, young love, old
love (and an astonishing mixture of the two), and social-political intrigue veiled in recent history, yet
involving a bloody murder and a hidden body. Territorial Rights might therefore be labeled a suspense
novel, but it is not; it is too cheeky and cheerful for that. Rather, it is a novel about jaded, eccentric people
who themselves believe in the possibility of a novel of suspense. Spark’s characters play their quirky roles
within a book which is, itself, laughing at them. Reading the novel, one senses Spark’s muted laughter and
bemused affection behind one’s own startled and delighted gasps of recognition at the human foibles she
so unerringly makes natural and almost cinematically graphic.
her basic theme is people and their various survival techniques. In this novel, Spark has a glorious rogues
gallery of characters drawn together unexpectedly by an old, nearly forgotten murder and the resultant
various forms of blackmail and subterfuge its discovery entails. Each of these characters, from the highest
to the lowest, from the richest to the poorest, has something to hide; yet they are all filled with pride as
they scramble to protect themselves from one another while also keeping blindly occupied in order to
avoid their own self-knowledge. It is to their dubious credit that each of them is successful in his or her self-
delusion. It keeps them from despair, perhaps from suicide.

This theme of the human proclivity for indulging in self-deception is given a further, typically Sparkian twist
by the impact of the novel’s title. The characters are all tourists in Venice where each has come for escape
from unpleasant reality elsewhere. Inevitably they find that there is no safety from one another, and
moreover, no larger, societal safety at all for them in a place where, as outsiders, they have no territorial
rights. They are characters whose moral lives have been built upon shifting sand, living temporarily and
precariously in a sinking city built upon water. Under these conditions, their efforts to shore up their
various prides and deceptions are both touching and hilarious. The central character, Robert Leaver, for
example, tries to save his self-esteem by turning on his philandering, pompous father and by blackmailing
his own former lover, Mark Curran, a wealthy, effete American; but Robert fools no one but himself.
Everyone around him knows he merely resents his father’s having a successful, good time with a mistress
away from his stuffy home, stuffy job, and stuffy wife. They know, too, that he envies Curran his urbanity,
his attractiveness, and his knowledge of art and architecture even more than he envies him the money he
claims to be after.