MURIEL SPARK
Muriel Spark
(1918-2006), British writer of novels,
short stories, poetry, and criticism. Her novels are wry commentaries on modern
life observed in various locales, and are colored by her Roman Catholic faith
(she converted to Catholicism in 1954).
Spark’s
incisive satires of social pettiness and vanity speak to the mystery and terror
of life, death, and eternity—universals that the literate and cultured
characters of her books are forever in danger of forgetting. In the novel Memento
Mori (1959), for example, a group of aged intellectuals carry on their
bickering and rivalries even as they are successively dying, each one warned by
a mysterious phone call, “Remember you must die.” In The Girls of Slender
Means (1963), a group of men and women engage in vicious personal
competition, which is interrupted when their lives are shattered by the absurd
explosion of a bomb that had failed to detonate during the London Blitz of
the early 1940s.
Spark
was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh,
Scotland. In 1937 she married S. O. Spark and moved to Africa, where she spent
several years in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The
marriage was dissolved and Muriel Spark returned to England in 1944, during
World War II, and found work in the Foreign Office on anti-Nazi propaganda. She
relocated to Italy in
1967 and lived there for the rest of her life.
Spark’s
best known novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), the story of
an eccentric Edinburgh schoolteacher seen through the eyes of an admiring (but
later disenchanted) pupil. It was later successfully adapted for the Broadway stage
and as a motion picture (see The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie). Other works by Spark include The Comforters
(1957), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Mandelbaum Gate
(1965), The Hothouse by the East River (1973), and Territorial Rights
(1979). Her novels of the 1980s include Loitering with Intent (1981), a
discussion of good, evil, and the writer as creator; The Only Problem
(1984), a witty meditation on the Old Testament Book of Job; and A
Far Cry from Kensington (1988), a tale of good and evil set in the
publishing world of the 1950s.
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Academic year 2008/2009
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Universitat de València Press