Muriel Spark is a novelist, a poet and a short-story writer. She was born in Edinburgh and educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls and Heriot-Watt College. She is of Jewish-Italian descent, and a long-time resident in Rome, Italy. Her novels are wryly satirical commentaries on modern life observed in various locales, coloured by her Roman Catholic faith (she converted to Catholicism in 1954). Spark travelled to South Africa and spent several years in Zimbabwe, and married S.O. Spark in 1938. The marriage was dissolved and Muriel Spark returned to England in 1944 to work in political intelligence at the Foreign Office.
M. Spark was born in 1918. She was educated in Edinburgh, Britain. By World
War II she had spent several years in Central Africa. Upon her return to
Britain she worked in a department of the Foreign Office. She subsequently
edited two poetry magazines and the letters of eminent 19
century
English writers. Her published works included biographies of 19
century prominent figures and a volume of poetry. In 1951 she was awarded
first prize in the short story competition organized by the English Sunday
newspaper `The Observer'. In 1962 she won the Italian Prize for dramatic
radio. By 1963 her stories had appeared in many English and American
magazines. Apart from short stories, M. Spark is the author of novels,
numerous books of criticism, biography and plays.
Being one of the most highly-honoured and respected authors in Scotland and England, Muriel Spark is certainly a literary sort and a very prolific writer.
Literary work, style. Much of M. Spark's writing has been informed by her personal experience. Catholicism has always been a recurring theme in her books. She transfigures the commonplace and makes the ordinary marvelous, sinister or strange. Her witty novels expose the petty foibles of her characters with merciless satire. Some of Muriel Spark's novels focus on unusual crimes and turns of fate, most notably Territorial Rights about a crime of passion. Her writing is unique and intriguing and always thought provoking. The most obvious characteristic of her style is that she succeeds in crafting an interesting group of characters. All the stories of Muriel Spark are distinguished by originality; beauty elegance, wit, and shock value. No other writer commands so exhilarating a style -- playful and rigorous, cheerful and venomous, hilariously acute and coolly supernatural.
Muriel Spark progressed from fantastic themes to a preoccupation of the weighty and malign. Many of her early works such as The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Girls of Slender Means are characterized by a mildly humorous fantasy. To read The Girls of Slender Means is to appreciate the economy and brilliance of Spark's style, it being an innovative book.
The Comforters displays her talent for irony and black humor. Memento Mori and The Bachelors establish her reputation as a satirical novelist with a sharp, oblique humor and a detached, elegant style. The Mandelbaum Gate marks a departure toward weightier themes and later novels The Drivers Seat, Loitering with Intent are of a distinctly sinister nature. The next novel, Not to Disturb, is a brilliant research into the very nature of fiction. The Takeover and Territorial Rights are longer novels, both set in Italy and less lucid, made more complicated by their interest in large political issues: capitalism, communism, terrorism. Spark's brusque high style is revealed in Aiding and Abbeting (2001).
She has also written critical studies of Mary Shelley (1951) and John Masefield (1953) and a biography of Emily Bronte (1953).
Muriel Spark received the award for a lifetime writing achievement, which really began with best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It is about an eccentric Edinburgh schoolteacher who is seen through the eyes of her admiring pupils, was successfully adapted for stage and the splendid film starring Maggie Smith. Miss Jean Brodie was based on a teacher who had helped M. Spark realize her talent. The book itself carries several of the Spark trademarks: a taut, nervy, controlled style; precise characterization; and a deadly accurate wit which entertains and appalls at the same time. The Sparkian world is peopled by ordinary, familiar characters and frequently features powerful and iron-willed women; it has an edge of bleakness and frequently sinister undertones.
Critical Perspective. Dame Muriel Spark had an active literary life as poet and biographer before she turned, in 1951, to fiction. It was not until 1957, after conversion to Catholicism, that she published her first novel, The Comforters, a book of extraordinary originality that won the applause of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh - not because they were also Catholic authors but because of the skill and depth of her writing. Her admirers will find in her books all of high and varied interest, much to enjoy: that crisp, dark wit, and above all the elusive gift of uniqueness that distinctive voice, that distinctive vision of the world, an odd blend of the strange and the ordinary; whimsy and common sense, the straight-faced and the playful.
She received several honorary degrees, some in Oxford and London and many in Scotland, and was elected a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was also an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Commandeur de I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.