The Scottish writer Muriel Spark is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, adapted into a successful film starring Maggie Smith, but it is just one of many books that ensured her reputation as a leading British novelist of the 20th century....
Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918, to a Jewish father and an Anglican, English mother, Muriel married Sidney Spark in what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1937. They had one son, Robin, but Sidney’s manic depression and violent outbursts meant the marriage didn’t last; Muriel returned to Britain, where she worked in Intelligence during the Second World War.
Like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Spark converted to Catholicism and credited her new-found faith with giving her the confidence to pursue her writing career. Three years after her baptism in 1954 her first novel, The Comforters, was published to great acclaim. After that the books came rapidly, demonstrating her gift for handling serious, often dark subjects with a light, comedic touch: Memento Mori (1959), in which a group of elderly gentlefolk receive sinister phone calls; The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), set in a South London suburb on the cusp of social change; and The Bachelors (1960), a chilling tale of fraud, blackmail and murder.
It was the publication in 1961 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about a group of schoolgirls captivated by a charismatic teacher who, it is gradually revealed, is a fascist sympathizer, that propelled Spark’s fame beyond literary circles. This was followed in 1963 by The Girls of Slender Means, which drew on her experience of living in a women’s club during the war, and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), an exploration of her Jewish heritage.
Soon after, Spark settled in Tuscany with her partner, the artist Penelope Jardine. In later life, she became bitterly estranged from her son Robin over his desire to claim Jewish ancestry through the female line, which she believed to be unfounded. ‘So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written,’ she wrote in her 1992 autobiography Curriculum Vitae, ‘that I felt it time to put the record straight.’
Muriel Spark was made a CBE in 1993 for services to literature and died in Florence in 2006, at the age of 88.
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