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.

Spark returned to fiction after an absence of some years with the novel Aiding and Abetting (2001). A satire on the manners and morals of the British aristocracy, it is based on the real-life disappearance of Lord Lucan in 1974 after a failed attempt to bludgeon his wife to death. Her final novel, The Finishing School (2004), is a comedic work set in Switzerland.

Spark’s autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, appeared in 1993. Early in her career she also wrote the critical studies John Masefield (1953), Emily Bronte: Her Life and Work (1953), and Mary Shelley: A Biography (1987). Spark’s shorter fiction was collected in the books The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985), Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories (1997), and All the Stories of Muriel Spark (2001). All the Poems of Muriel Spark was published in 2004.