MURIEL SPARK
Muriel
Sarah Spark (born 1918) wrote biography, literary
criticism, poetry, and fiction, including the novel
that was considered her masterpiece, The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie.
Born in Edinburgh on February 1, 1918, Muriel Spark worked
in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office in
1944-1945, was the general secretary of the Poetry Society from 1947 to 1949,
and served as the editor of Poetry Review in 1949. She was the founder
of the literary magazine Forum and worked as a part-time editor for
Peter Owen Ltd.
In the early 1950s
Spark published her first poetry
collection, The Fanfarlo and Other Verse
(1952), and built a solid reputation as a biographer with Child of Light: A
Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951);
Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (1953);
and John Masefield (1953). She also edited A Collection of Poems
by Emily Brontë (1952), My Best Mary: The Letters of Mary Shelley
(1954), and, most important, Letters of John Henry Newman (1957).
While working in these areas of nonfiction, Spark was
undergoing a crisis of faith and was strongly influenced by the writings of
Newman, the 19th-century Anglican clergyman who became a convert to Roman
Catholicism and eventually a cardinal in that faith. While she was dealing with
her crisis, she received financial and psychological assistance from Graham
Greene, also a Roman Catholic convert, and was eventually converted herself, a
move that had significant influence on her novels.
Spark published the
first of those novels, The Comforters, in 1957 and followed that with Robinson
in 1958, the same year she authored her first short-story collection, The
Go-Away Bird and Other Stories. In this same period she began writing radio
plays, with The Party through the Wall in
1957, The Interview in 1958, and The Dry River Bed in 1959.
It was in 1959 that Spark had her first major success,
Memento Mori, with some critics comparing her to Ivy Compton-Burnett and
Evelyn Waugh. She followed this with The Ballad of Peckham Rye in 1960,
writing a radio play based on the novel that same year; The Bachelors,
also in 1960; and Voices at Play in 1961, likewise turned into a radio
play.
In 1961 she also published the novel generally
regarded as her masterwork, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, subsequently
made into a play, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in the years 1966 to
1968; a film in 1969; and a six-part adaptation for television, another
transatlantic success, in 1978 and 1979. This was the portrait of a middle-aged
teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s who has
gathered around her a coterie of five girls, "The Brodie Set." Jean
Brodie was one of those delightful eccentrics, common in English fiction, who
walked a tightrope over the abyss of caricature but never tumbled in. She saw
her task as "putting old heads on young shoulders" and told her
disciples that they were the créme de la créme. In 1939 she was forced
to retire on the grounds that she has been teaching fascism, the accusation
made by the girl who eventually became a nun and defended herself against
charges of betrayal by observing that "It's only possible to betray where
loyalty is due." Critic George Stade probably best defined Spark's
attitude toward Jean Brodie by pointing out that the novel embodied "the
traditional moral wisdom that, if you are not part of something larger than
yourself, you are nothing."
In 1962 Spark's
sole venture into theater, Doctors of
Philosophy, was presented in London and was not a resounding
success. She returned to fiction and wrote The Girls of Slender Means
(1963); The Mandelbaum Gate (1965); Collected Stories I (1967); The
Public Image (1968); The Very Fine Clock (1968), her only work for
juveniles; The Driver's Seat (1970); Not To Disturb (1971); and The
Hothouse by the East River (1973).
Also in 1973 Sharp published another outstanding
novel, The Abbess of Crewe, a work alive with paradox. To win election
as abbess, the protagonist, Sister Gertrude, studied Machiavelli; once in
charge, she combined an extreme conservatism in religious matters with the
installation of electronic devices in the abbey and enlisted the aid of two
Jesuit priests in exposing the affair between Sister Felicity and a young
Jesuit. Released from the abbey, Sister Gertrude roamed the Third World like a
loose cannon, indulging in such projects as mediating a war between a tribe of
cannibals and a tribe of vegetarians. The novel was filmed in 1976 under the
title Nasty Habits.
Subsequently there came the novels The Takeover
(1976); Territorial Rights (1979); Loitering with Intent (1981); A
Far Cry from Kensington (1987); The Only Problem (1988); Symposium
(1990); Reality and Dreams (1997); and two collections of short stories,
Bang-Bang You're Dead and Other Stories (1982) and The Stories of
Muriel Spark (1985). In 1992, she published Curriculum Vitae:
Autobiography.
Her twentieth
novel, Reality and Dreams explored the boundaries and connections
between realities and dreams in a story about a dream-driven film director who
feels and seeks to be Godlike in his work, a theme which illustrated the
aptness of critic Frank Kermode's insight that in Spark's novels portrayed a
connection between fiction and the world, and between the creation of the
novelist and the creation of God. Some of her more recent work can be found inOpen
to the Public: New and Collected Stories (1998) and Aiding and Abetting
(2000). Her latest publication is The Complete Short Stories of Muriel Spark,
which was published in 2001.
Much of the criticism about Spark's work focused on
the extent to which her Catholicism influenced her writing; that is, was she a
Catholic novelist or a novelist who was incidentally a Catholic? The former
view was upheld by American critic Granville Hicks, who termed her "a
gloomy Catholic, like Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor, more concerned with
the evil of man than the goodness of God." J.D. Enright, on the other
hand, felt that, unlike Paul Claudel or François Mauriac or Graham Greene, she
had no interest in force-feeding Catholicism to her readers. Religion aside,
Duncan Fallowell summed up her fiction in this way: "She is the master,
and sometimes mistress, of an attractive, cynical worldliness which is not
shallow." And that observation probably best encapsulated British critical
opinion, which has been generally kind, if not generous, to her work for four
decades.
In 1993, Spark was
made Dame Muriel Spark, Order of the British Empire.
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Academic year
2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
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Universitat de València Press