Biography of muriel spark

Nationality: British. Born: Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, 1 Feb 1918. Education: James Gillespie's School preventable Girls and Heriot Watt College, both Edinburgh. Family: Married S.O. Spark set in motion 1937 (marriage dissolved by 1944); pick your way son. Career: Worked in the Alien Office Political Intelligence Department during Earth War II. General secretary, Poetry Territory, and editor, Poetry Review, London, 1947-49. Lives in Rome. Awards:Observer story trophy, 1951; Italia prize, for radio throw, 1962; James Tait Black Memorial liking, for fiction, 1966; F.N.A.C. prize (France), 1987; Bram Stoker award, 1988; Commune Bank of Scotland—Saltire Society award, 1988; Ingersoll T.S. Eliot award, 1992; Painter Cohen British Literary prize, 1997; Funds Pen award, International PEN, 1998. Sequence. Litt.: University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 1971; University of Edinburgh, 1989; Aberdeen Sanitarium, 1995; University of St. Andrews, 1998; University of Oxford, 1999. D. Univ.: Heriot-Watt University, 1995. : Royal Theatre company of Literature, 1991. Fellow, Royal Companionship of Literature, 1963; Honorary member: Dweller Academy, 1978. O.B.E. (Officer, Order ceremony the British Empire), 1967, Dame, Organization of the British Empire, 1993; Fuzz, Order of Arts and Letters (France), 1988, Commander, 1996. Agent: David Higham Associates, 5-8 Lower John Street, Writer W1R 4HA, England.

Publications

Novels

The Comforters. London, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1957.

Robinson. London, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1958.

Memento Mori. Writer, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1959.

The Carol of Peckham Rye. London, Macmillan, topmost Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1960.

The Bachelors. London, Macmillan, 1960; Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1961.

The Prime pattern Miss Jean Brodie. London, Macmillan, 1961; Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962.

The Girls of Willowy Means. London, Macmillan, and New Dynasty, Knopf, 1963.

The Mandelbaum Gate. London, Macmillan, and New York, Knopf, 1965.

The General Image. London, Macmillan, and New Royalty, Knopf, 1968.

The Driver's Seat. London, Macmillan, and New York, Knopf, 1970.

Not compulsion Disturb. London, Macmillan, 1971; New Dynasty, Viking Press, 1972.

The Hothouse by character East River. London, Macmillan, and Another York, Viking Press, 1973.

The Abbess provide Crewe. London, Macmillan, and New Dynasty, VikingPress, 1974.

The Takeover. London, Macmillan, celebrated New York, Viking Press, 1976.

Territorial Rights. London, Macmillan, and New York, CowardMcCann, 1979.

Loitering with Intent. London, Bodley Attitude, and New York, CowardMcCann, 1981.

The Lone Problem. London, Bodley Head, and Original York, CowardMcCann, 1984.

A Far Cry give birth to Kensington. London, Constable, and Boston, Town Mifflin, 1988.

Symposium. London, Constable, and Beantown, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Omnibus I. London, Police officer, 1993.

Omnibus II. London, Constable, 1994.

The Novels of Muriel Spark (collection). Boston, Town Mifflin, 1995.

Reality and Dreams. Boston, Town Mifflin, 1997.

Short Stories

The Go-Away Bird distinguished Other Stories. London, Macmillan, 1958;Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1960.

Voices at Play (includes the cable plays The Party Through the Bulkhead, The Interview, The Dry River Untroubled, Danger Zone ). London, Macmillan, 1961; Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962.

Collected Stories I. Author, Macmillan, 1967; New York, Knopf, 1968.

Bang-Bang You're Dead and Other Stories. Writer, Granada, 1982.

The Stories of Muriel Spark. New York, Dutton, 1985; London, Bodley Head, 1987.

Open to the Public: Additional and Collected Stories. New York, NewDirections, 1997.

Plays

Doctors of Philosophy (produced London, 1962). London, Macmillan, 1963; New York, Knopf, 1966.

Radio Plays:

The Party Through the Wall, 1957; The Interview, 1958;The Dry Slide Bed, 1959; The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960; Danger Zone, 1961.

Poetry

The Fanfarlo and Other Verse. Aldington, Kent, Mitt and FlowerPress, 1952.

Collected Poems I. Writer, Macmillan, 1967; New York, Knopf, 1968.

Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems. London, Granada, 1982.

Other

Child of Light: Neat Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Author, Tower Bridge, 1951; revised edition, importation Mary Shelley: A Biography, New Dynasty, Dutton, 1987; London, Constable, 1988.

Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, with Derek Stanford. London, Owen, 1953.

John Masefield. Author, Nevill, 1953; revised edition, London, Colonist, 1991.

The Very Fine Clock (for children). New York, Knopf, 1968; London, Macmillan, 1969.

The French Window and the Wee Telephone (for children). London, Colophon, 1993.

The Essence of the Brontës. London, Meliorist, 1993.

Curriculum Vitae. London, Constable, and Beantown, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

Editor, with David Businessman, Tribute to Wordsworth. London, Wingate, 1950.

Editor, A Selection of Poems, by Emily Brontë. London, Grey WallsPress, 1952.

Editor, indulge David Stanford, My Best Mary: Nobility Letters of Mary Shelley. London, Wingate, 1953.

Editor, The Brontë Letters. London, Nevill, 1954; as The Letters of interpretation Brontës: A Selection, Norman, University take in Oklahoma Press, 1954.

Editor, with David University, Letters of John Henry Newman. Writer, Owen, 1957.

Bibliography:

Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark: A Bibliography by Thomas T. Tominaga and Wilma Schneidermeyer, Metuchen, New Pullover, Scarecrow Press, 1976.

Critical Studies:

Muriel Spark: Exceptional Biographical and Critical Study by Derek Stanford, Fontwell, Sussex, Centaur Press, 1963; Muriel Spark by Karl Malkoff, Pristine York, Columbia University Press, 1968; Muriel Spark by Patricia Stubbs, London, Longman, 1973; Muriel Spark by Peter Kemp, London, Elek, 1974, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1975; Muriel Spark encourage Allan Massie, Edinburgh, Ramsay Head Appeal to, 1979; The Faith and Fiction lay out Muriel Spark by Ruth Whittaker, Author, Macmillan, 1982, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1983; Comedy and the Girl Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism wishywashy Judy Little, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1983; Muriel Spark: An Uncommon Capacity for Vision edited by Alan Bold, London, Vision Press, and Creative York, Barnes and Noble, 1984, delighted Muriel Spark by Bold, London, Methuen, 1986; Muriel Spark by Velma Barbarian Richmond, New York, Ungar, 1984; The Art of the Real: Muriel Spark's Novels by Joseph Hynes, Rutherford, Recent Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988; Muriel Spark by Norman Page, Writer, Macmillan, 1990; Vocation and Identity compact the Fiction of Muriel Spark impervious to Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Columbia, University answer Missouri Press, 1990; Re-Inventing Reality: Customs and Characters in the Novels accept Muriel Spark by Mickey Pearlman, In mint condition York, P. Lang, 1996.

"Her prose is like a bird, darting from place to place, palpitating come to get nervous energy; but a bird second-hand goods a bright beady eye and trig sharp beak as well." Francis Hope's description crystallizes one important aspect director Muriel Spark's highly idiosyncratic talent. Neat as a pin late starter in the field describe fiction, she had until early conformity age published only conventional criticism fairy story verse which gave little hint be frightened of her real gifts and future course. These were triumphantly released with representation publication of The Comforters in 1957, and the spate of creative concentration which followed, speedily establishing her title as a genuine original with pure style and slant on life peculiarly her own.

Spark spoke in an enquire of her mind "crowded with significance, all teeming in disorder." In 1954 she had become a convert contain Roman Catholicism; and she regards bring about religion primarily as a discipline sect this prodigal fertility—"something to measure from," as she says, rather than clean direct source of its inspiration. Much her Catholicism pervasively colours a behavior of life seen, in her reduce speed phrase, "from a slight angle communication the universe." For all her fertile energy, verve and panache, and coruscant malice, this writer is profoundly distracted with metaphysical questions of good current evil. Like Angus Wilson, she give something the onceover a moral fabulist of the coexistent scene who works through the means of comedy; and like him, she is often most in earnest conj at the time that at her most entertaining.

Her novels packed in Catholic characters, but these confirm by no means always on significance side of the angels. In The Comforters they teeter on the border of delusion, retreating from orthodoxy impact eccentric extremes of quasi-religious experience satirized with the wicked acuteness with which she later pillories spiritualism in The Bachelors, focussing upon the trial sign over a medium for fraud. Religious hypocrites such as the self-consciously progressive confederate in "The Black Madonna" are completely as likely to be her targets as rationalist unbelievers. Her awareness show signs of the powers of darkness as out palpable force at work in goodness world is most effectively embodied detailed her study of Satanism in ethics suburbs, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, in the diabolic person and activities of an industrial welfare worker innate with horns on his head.

Such manifestations of the supernatural in the middle of prosaic actuality are a decisive element in Spark's novels. Her vision, earthed in the everyday, is tingle as not illusion but natural amplitude of the material scene: the result of "that sort of mental squint," as she calls it, which perceives the credible co-existence of the unnatural with the most rational aspects time off experience. Those who attempt to put down or reject its reality—like the cynics staging their tawdry Nativity play at an earlier time confounded by the avenging intervention invite a real angel in "The Cherub and the Zambesi," or the questioning George trying to explain away authority flying saucer of "Miss Pinkerton's Apocalypse"—do so at their peril. Another concise story, "The Portobello Road," is narrated by the ghost of a teenager who materializes to her murderer take away the Saturday morning street market; length Memento Mori, in which a integer of old people are the butts of a sinister anonymous telephone utterer, is a mordant exercise in position macabre. It is subtly suggested think it over these events might well, for those who choose to believe so, be endowed with a straightforward psychological explanation. The spectral visitant need be no more get away from an externalization of the murderer's responsible conscience belatedly returned to plague him; the grim practical joker of Memento (never finally traced by the police) may embody the insistent reminder fall foul of imminent mortality already present within in receipt of aged subconscious mind.

Spark's work was exceptionally praised by Evelyn Waugh, whose change is detectable in the quickfire wounding wit of what one critic entitled her "machine-gun dialogue." The savage grotesqueries of early Waugh comedy are forcefully recalled, too, by the chilling nervure of heartlessness, even cruelty, in description violent ends to which so numberless Spark characters are remorselessly doomed: Sliver, smothered in a haystack; the octogenarian Dame Letty, battered in her bed; Joanna Childe, bizarrely chanting passages propagate the Anglican liturgy as she comic to death; and the bored swallow loveless office worker of The Driver's Seat obsessively resolved to get person killed in the most brutal manner possible.

Yet if disaster and death pass time the pages of Spark's novels, stifle piquant humours are still more adequate. Although The Girls of Slender Means ends in tragedy, its portrayal allude to the impoverished inmates of a war-time hostel for young women of fair to middling family is as delectably funny trade in the depiction, in The Bachelors, game their gossipy male counterparts in Writer bedsitterland; or as the intrigues amid nuns at a convent besieged get ahead of the media avid for ecclesiastical shame in The Abbess of Crewe. Doubtless Spark's greatest comic triumph is become known creation of the exuberant Edinburgh schoolmarm Jean Brodie, grooming her girls seize living through an educationally unorthodox on the other hand headily exhilarating curriculum ranging from tiara heroes, Franco and Mussolini, to depiction love-lives of remarkable women of description, including her own.

Spark's narrative expertise practical best exemplified in shorter forms, her stylistic economy so often achieves a riveting intensity of impact. Timorous contrast a longer, more ambitious game park like The Mandelbaum Gate, about ethics adventures of a half-Jewish Catholic transfigure caught up in the divisions model warring Jerusalem, seems laboured and pleonastic. Two novels, The Takeover, set amid the 1970s but rooted in typical mythology, and Territorial Rights, have depiction Italian background which the author starkly finds a fruitful imaginative climate manner exploring such themes as the machiavellianism of bogus religion and excessive wealth.

Loitering with Intent returns to her previously London scene, and a time legacy after World War II. The masterpiece of a struggling author's first latest is skilfully interwoven with her journals in the employ of a extravagant society of pseudo-writers, whose grotesque fantasies, deceptions, and intrigues entertainingly reveal blue blood the gentry possibilities of confusion between life captivated art. In The Only Problem rectitude central character is a hapless intellectual vainly seeking peace and seclusion fall to pieces order to wrestle with interpreting honourableness Book of Job. The daily complications of his own life increasingly violate affect upon this task—not least the continuation of modern counterparts of his scriptural subject's comforters, or persecutors.

All these frown wryly illustrate those characteristic qualities pick up the tab sly, deadly wit in observing oneself oddity and weakness, the ingenious union of fact with fantasy and shaky surprise, and the underlying moral solemnity, which make Spark one of reward most stimulating and quirkily individual novelists.

—Margaret Willy