MURIEL SPARK

1918-2006

"I like wit. I don't like a lot of laughter but I like a certain amount of wit in almost everything."

Birthplace

Edinburgh, Scotland

Education

James Gillespie's School for Girls, Edinburgh (upon which the Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was modelled, and where Spark came under the spell of a charismatic teacher); Heriot-Watt College, Edinburgh, where she did a course in precis-writing.

Other jobs

As a young woman she taught English and worked as a secretary. After an unhappy marriage in Africa, she worked on "various forms of subtle propaganda" for Foreign Office intelligence during the second world war, and brought new life to the Poetry Review in a stormy two-year editorship from 1947 to 1949.

Did you know?

She was spurred towards writing fiction after winning a short-story competition on the theme of Christmas in the Observer in 1951. "The Seraph and the Zambesi", based on her time in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), was chosen out of nearly 7,000 entries.

Critical verdict

Spark began her literary career in the 1950s as a poet and biographer (of Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë and John Masefield), but found her voice as a novelist and short-story writer. Fame arrived with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), an archly disturbing portrait of a schoolteacher and her coterie of favoured pupils, which the New Yorker published in its entirety. Since then she has published 20-odd books: slim, deceptively light works given to dark crimes and tragic reversals related in an authorial voice of steely omniscience. They anatomise such subjects as class, poverty, self-delusion and, most recently, creative jealousy (The Finishing School, 2004). The critic Robert Nye called her "brief, brittle and nasty"; many more have found her concise, witty and refreshingly clear-eyed, with Carol Shields praising her "economy and brilliance of style".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/11/murielspark

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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© María Cuenca López
macuenl2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press