Muriel Spark

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 Muriel Spark was identified as a promising and creative writer when her name was still
Muriel Camberg and she was still at school. Some of her poems had already been published
by the time she won her first poetry prize, at the age of 12.
 Dame Muriel — poet, writer of fiction and criticism, essayist and literary biographer — went
on to win a number of awards, was never out of print, and was at the top of her profession,
internationally, for more than half a century.
 Best-known as the author of 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', Muriel decided in the 1940s to
keep a record of her professional and personal activities, beginning a personal archive that is
now one of the largest and most comprehensive held by the National Library of Scotland.

CHILDHOOD
 Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard and Sarah
Camberg. She attended what was then James Gillespie's High School for Girls — a formative
time that she considered a most fortunate experience for a future writer.
 Gillespie's was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'.
One teacher in particular, Miss Christina Kay, was the inspiration for Muriel Spark's most
famous creation — the Edinburgh schoolmistress Jean Brodie. Although the unconventional
fictional character was in some ways unlike her real life model, Muriel felt that Miss Kay 'had
it in her, unrealised, to be the character I invented.'
 Muriel was known as the school's 'poet and dreamer'. Her poems appeared regularly in the
school magazine, and she was crowned 'Queen of Poetry' in 1932.

INTO THE WORLD

 When Muriel left school, she took a précis-writing course at Heriot-Watt College, and,
following a short spell teaching English, went to work as a secretary in a department store in
Edinburgh's Princes Street.
 In 1937, she sailed to Africa, where she married Sydney Oswald Spark, who had taken up a
teaching post in Southern Rhodesia (what is now Zimbabwe). She was 19, and her life there
was not a happy one. Her son, Robin, was born the following year, but her marriage was
failing and she longed to leave Africa. After the outbreak of the Second World War, travel
was difficult, and she had to wait until 1944 to secure a passage on a troop ship bound for
Liverpool.
 During these extreme circumstances, Muriel Spark continued writing, taking inspiration from
her experiences, and collecting memorable settings and characters for her later work.
 Arriving in England, Muriel was fortunate to get a wartime post in political intelligence at
MI6. She worked at Milton Bryan, near Woburn, which was later fictionalised as 'The
Compound' in 'The Hothouse by the East River'.

GETTING PUBLISHED
 When peace came in 1945, Muriel Spark began her critical apprenticeship as a journalist at
'Argentor', the official journal of the National Jewellers' Association, and started writing
seriously. She was already becoming well-known by the time she took up the post of editor
of the 'Poetry Review', the journal of the Poetry Society.
 Muriel left the Poetry Society after a disagreement over her policy of publishing new writers.
Her own writing was becoming more important, with the encouragement of supporters such
as established author Graham Greene. This was a turning point in her life, not least because
it was now that she decided to create her archive.
  In December 1951, her entry in 'The Observer' newspaper's short-story competition
triumphed over 6,700 others to take first prize. The success of 'The Seraph and The Zambesi'
stimulated her to write fiction.
 Muriel the poet had her first collection of poems, 'The Fanfarlo and Other Verse', published
in 1952. Aside from poetry, she was producing articles and books of criticism at this point in
the early 1950s. Extensive reading and research resulted in her writing seven critical studies
and editions — on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Emily Brontë, William Wordsworth, and John
Masefield — in the period leading up to her crucial decision to join the Roman Catholic
Church in 1954.

FIRST NOVELS
 Rapturous reviews — including one from Evelyn Waugh — greeted 'The Comforters', Muriel
Spark's first novel, started in 1954 and published in 1957.
 So began a string of six novels in a five-year period: 'Robinson' came next, in 1958, followed
by 'Memento Mori' (1959), 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye' (1960), 'The Bachelors' (1960), and
'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' (1961).
 In the United States, the Brodie tale was first published in almost its entirety in 'The New
Yorker' magazine, with immediate success. Early in the 1960s, the author decided to leave
London and live in New York, where she was given her own office at 'The New Yorker'. This
was quite an achievement: fellow contributors to the magazine in those days included J D
Salinger, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov.
 Muriel's social life in New York was full and plentiful: there was no shortage of parties and
literary gatherings with the foremost authors of the period. However, this did not get in the
way of two further novels, 'The Girls of Slender Means' (1963), set in wartime London, and
the prize-winning 'The Mandelbaum Gate' (1965), sections of which 'The New Yorker'
serialised.
 By 1966, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' had been adapted for the theatre, Vanessa
Redgrave heading the London cast of the first production. (Three years later the story would
be made into a film starring Maggie Smith.) Before the stage version transferred to Broadway
in 1968, Muriel Spark — now in the happy position of never again having to worry about
earning a living — chose to move on. She was at the peak of her career, and Italy beckoned.

FINEST WORKS
 Muriel Spark lived and enjoyed life in Rome, at that time home to a considerable number of
Britons and Americans. Cultural pursuits and social engagements in the Italian capital
contributed much to her lifelong interest in people and places.
 It was during her early time in Italy that Muriel wrote what she considered to be some of her
finest work.
 These include her personal favourite, 'The Driver's Seat', published in 1970 and later filmed
starring Elizabeth Taylor, followed by 'The Hothouse by the East River' (1973) — a striking,
uneasy tale with a twist. 'The Abbess of Crewe' was published in 1974, and it too was
adapted for cinema (Glenda Jackson this time taking the lead role). Highly evident in 'The
Abbess' is Muriel Spark's renowned satirical skill: the work, set in a convent, is a send-up of
the Watergate political scandal that rocked early-1970s America.
 Moving to Italy clearly stimulated Muriel as a writer. Her fictional output during this period
also consisted of the novels 'The Public Image' (1968) and 'Not To Disturb' (1971).
 During the years 1975-1985, when she divided her time between Tuscany and Rome, she
wrote 'The Takeover' (1976), 'Territorial Rights' (1979), 'Loitering with Intent' (1981) and 'The
Only Problem'.

LATER WORKS
  Settled in Tuscany by the mid-1980s, Muriel Spark lived in the home of her closest friend
Penelope Jardine, where she enjoyed the relative peace and quiet, surrounded by books,
cats, and olive groves. She continued to write, and released a steady stream of characters
and situations into the literary world.
 London became the principal setting for Muriel's next novel 'A Far Cry from Kensington'
(1988). Like her earlier works 'The Girls of Slender Means', and 'Loitering with Intent', the
novel returned to the world of bed-sits and rooming-houses, and of struggling writers and
shifty publishers.
 'Symposium' (1990) was followed by her autobiography 'Curriculum Vitae' in 1992. From her
upbringing in Edinburgh to the publication of her first novel in 1957, the book reveals
Muriel's steely determination: 'I knew my troubles to be temporary if I decided so', she
wrote.
 Her 1996 novel 'Reality and Dreams' told of a narcissistic film director's troubles, while
'Aiding and Abetting' (2000) was a fictionalised take on the Lord Lucan disappearance / story,
populated — as so often — with a cast of blackmailers and frauds.
 Muriel's 22nd novel, 'The Finishing School', takes a wonderfully satirical look at creative
writing in the classroom. Published in March 2004, this was to be her last completed novel.
The same year, she published 'All the Poems', a volume of poetry which spanned her writing
career. Her 23rd novel was unfinished when Muriel Spark died in Florence in April 2006.

A LASTING IMPRESSION
 Muriel Spark received numerous awards during her career, beginning with the prestigious
Italia Prize in 1962 for an adaptation of 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye'. She received many
honorary degrees, and became 'Dame Muriel Spark' when she was made a Dame
Commander of the British Empire in 1993.
 The Muriel Spark archive at the National Library of Scotland contains evidence of the
impression the author made on her many readers over the years, and hundreds of fan letters
are testament to the popularity of her books.
 Her work also found critical approval. A review of her collected short stories in 'The
Scotsman' newspaper in 2001 described them as 'one of the greatest collections of short
fiction in English'.
 Muriel Spark's novels, with their unique blend of the supernatural and the real, the comic
and the tragic, satire, ridicule and allegory, helped to change the face of fiction in the English
language.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
 1957'The Comforters'
 1958'Robinson'
 1959'Memento Mori'
 1960'The Ballad of Peckham Rye''The Bachelors'
 1961'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'
 1963'The Girls of Slender Means'
 1965'The Mandelbaum Gate'
 1968'The Public Image'
 1970'The Driver's Seat'
 1971'Not to Disturb'
 1973'The Hothouse by the East River'
 1974'The Abbess of Crewe'
 1976'The Takeover'
 1979'Territorial Rights'
  1981'Loitering with Intent'
 1984'The Only Problem'
 1988'A Far Cry from Kensington'
 1990'Symposium'
 1996'Reality and Dreams'
 2000'Aiding and Abetting'
 2004'The Finishing School'
Other works
 1950'Tribute to Wordsworth' [edited by Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford]
 1951'Child of Light' [a study of Mary Shelley]
 1952'The Fanfarlo and Other Verse'
 1952'Selected Poems of Emily Brontë'
 1953'John Masefield' [biography]
 1953'Emily Brontë: Her life and work' [by Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford]
 1953'My Best Mary' [a selection of letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Muriel
Spark and Derek Stanford]
 1954'The Brontë letters'
 1957'Letters of John Henry Newman' [edited by Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford]
 1958'The Go-away Bird' [short stories]
 1961'Voices at Play' [short stories and plays]
 1963'Doctors of Philosophy' [play]
 1967'Collected Poems''Collected Stories'
 1982'Bang-bang You're Dead' [short stories]
 1982'Going up to Sotheby's' [poems]
 1992'Curriculum Vitae' [autobiography]
 2001'Complete Short Stories'
 2004'All the Poems'