Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark
Born	Muriel Sarah Camberg 1 February 1918(1918-02-01) Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	13 April 2006(2006-04-13) (aged 88) Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Occupation	novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist
Notable work(s)	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Mandelbaum Gate The Driver's Seat Memento Mori

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006)^[1] was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[2]

Early life

She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, the daughter of Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell) and Bernard Camberg, an engineer.^[3] Her father was Jewish and her mother had been raised a Presbyterian, as was Spark.^[4][5] She was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls (1923 – 1935).^[6] The family lived in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. In 1934–35 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.^[7]

On 3 September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was manic depressive and prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel left Sidney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London;^[8] years later the club would be her inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means.^[8] She worked in Intelligence for the remainder of World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to set up home in England, but Robin returned to Britain with his father later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Writing career

Spark began writing seriously after the war, under her married name, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947 she became editor of the Poetry Review. In 1954 she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a fellow novelist and contemporary of Spark, wrote that Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do."^[13] In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing: "I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know — but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…" Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision.

Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957. It featured several references to Catholicism and conversion to Catholicism, although its main theme revolved around a young woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)^[14] was more successful. Spark displayed originality of subject and tone, making extensive use of flashforwards and imagined conversations. It is clear that James Gillespie's High School was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in the novel.

After living in New York City for some years, she moved to Rome, where she met artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine in 1968. In the early 1970s they settled in Tuscany, in the village of Civitella della Chiana, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumours of lesbian relationships^[15] from her time in New York onwards, although Spark and her friends denied their validity. She left her entire estate to Jardine, taking measures to ensure that her son receive nothing.^[16]

Spark refused permission to publish a biography of her written by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine now holds publication approval rights, and the book was published in July 2009. On 27 July 2009 Stannard was interviewed on Front Row, the BBC Radio 4 arts programme. According to A. S. Byatt, "She [Jardine] was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer".^[17]

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the US Ingersoll Foundation T. S. Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent.^[18] In 2010 Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat.

Relationship with her son

Spark and her son Robin had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Orthodox Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognized as Jewish (Spark's maternal grandmother, Adelaide Hyams, had married her maternal grandfather, Tom Uezzell, in a church; it was unclear whether both of Adelaide's parents were Jewish).^[19] The devout Catholic Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.^[20] During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an enquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'.^[21][22][23]

Bibliography

Years link to corresponding "[year] in literature" article or, in the case of poetry, to the "[year] in poetry" article:

Novels

• The Comforters (1957)
• Robinson (1958)
• Memento Mori (1959)
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
• The Bachelors (1960)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
• The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
• The Public Image (1968) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Driver's Seat (1970)
• Not to Disturb (1971)
• The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
• The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
• The Takeover (1976)
• Territorial Rights (1979)
• Loitering with Intent (1981) - Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Only Problem (1984)
• A Far Cry From Kensington (1988)
• Symposium (1990)
• Reality and Dreams (1996)
• Aiding and Abetting (2000)
• The Finishing School (2004)

Other works

• Tribute to Wordsworth (edited with Derek Stanford) (1950)
• Child of Light (a study of Mary Shelley) (1951)
• The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952)
• Selected Poems of Emily Brontë (1952)
• John Masefield (biography) (1953)
• Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (with Derek Stanford) (1953)
• My Best Mary (a selection of letters of Mary Shelley, edited with Derek Stanford) (1953)
• The Brontë letters (1954)
• Letters of John Henry Newman (edited with Derek Stanford) (1957)
• The Go-away Bird (short stories) (1958)
• Voices at Play (short stories and plays) (1961)
• Doctors of Philosophy (play) (1963)
• Collected Poems I (1967)
• Collected Stories I (1967)
• The Very Fine Clock (children's book, illustrations by Edward Gorey)(1968)
• Bang-bang You're Dead (short stories) (1982)
• Mary Shelley (complete revision of Child of Light) (1987)
• Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems (1982)
• Curriculum Vitae (autobiography) (1992)
• Complete Short Stories (2001)
• All the Poems (2004)

References

1. ^ Guardian obituary.
2. ^ The 50 greatest British writers since 1945. 5 January 2008. The Times. Retrieved 2010-02-19
3. ^ "Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,' Dies at 88". The New York Times. 23 April 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/world/16spark.html?pagewanted=all. 
4. ^ Glendinning, Victoria (20 May 1979). "Talk With Muriel Spark". The New York Times. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20A1FFD355C12728DDDA90A94DD405B898BF1D3. 
5. ^ Guardian obituary
6. ^ Hal Hager
7. ^ James Gillespie's High School Official Site
8. ^ ^{a b} Taylor, Benjamin (May 2010). "Goodbye Very Much: The many lives of Muriel Spark". Harper's (Harper's Foundation) 320 (1,920): 78–82. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/0082959. Retrieved 21 August 2011. (subscription required)
9. ^ Author Muriel Spark dies aged 88, BBC News , April 15, 2006, accompanied by an obituary.
10. ^ Dame Muriel Spark, 1918–2006: The novelist of identity, Weekly Standard, 1 May 2006
11. ^ Spark of Genius, a consideration of the author's work in the Winter 2006 Doublethink magazine
12. ^ National Library of Scotland Biography
13. ^ Hal Hager, "About Muriel Spark," Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999) 141
14. ^ The story was published in The New Yorker magazine in 1961, and was first published as a separate novel in 1962.
15. ^ How The New Yorker Made Muriel Spark's Reputation, 17 April 2006
16. ^ Muriel Spark leaves millions to woman friend rather than son
17. ^ "Companion shelves 'unfair' Spark biography"
18. ^ publisher = The Man Booker Prizes "Muriel Spark". http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/authors/122 publisher = The Man Booker Prizes. 
19. ^ "letter killeth, The". The Spectator. 1998. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_199806/ai_n8801674/pg_3/. 
20. ^ A far cry from Morningside 23 Apr 2006
21. ^ Book Festival readings 2004
22. ^ Bard Mitzvah, 2 July 1998
23. ^ "Spark's son: I won't cash in on mum", The Scotsman, 14 May 2006

External links

• Works by or about Muriel Spark in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Archival material relating to Muriel Spark listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• The Muriel Spark Papers at Washington University in St. Louis
• Muriel Spark fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections
• Guardian obituary
• In their own words BBC interview 03 December 1971 (Video, 30 mins)
• "Chrysalis": a poem by Muriel Spark from TLS, 17 January 2008

Persondata
Name	Spark, Muriel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1 February 1918
Place of birth	Edinburgh, Scotland
Date of death	13 April 2006
Place of death	Florence, Tuscany, Italy