Muriel Spark - Wikipedia Muriel Spark From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Dame Muriel Spark DBE Spark in 1960 Born Muriel Sarah Camberg (1918-02-01)1 February 1918 Edinburgh, UK Died 13 April 2006(2006-04-13) (aged 88) Florence, Tuscany, Italy Resting place Cemetery of Sant'Andrea Apostolo, Civitella in Val di Chiana Occupation Novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist Language English Alma mater Heriot-Watt College Notable works The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Mandelbaum Gate The Driver's Seat Memento Mori Spouse Sidney Oswald Spark ​ ​ (m. 1937; sep. 1940)​ Children 1 Dame Muriel Sarah Spark DBE FRSE FRSL (née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006)[1] was a British novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Contents 1 Life 2 Literary career 3 Archive and biography 4 Honours and acclaim 5 Relationship with her son 6 Bibliography 6.1 Novels 6.2 Other works 7 Notes 8 References 9 Works on Spark's writing 10 External links Life[edit] Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell).[2] Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls (1923–35), where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith.[3] 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. In 1937 she became engaged to Sidney Oswald Spark, thirteen years her senior, whom she had met in Edinburgh. In August of that year, she followed him out to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and they were married on 3rd September 1937 in Salisbury.[4] Their son Samuel 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 temporarily placed Robin in a convent school, as children were not permitted to travel during the war. She returned to Britain in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London.[5] She worked in Intelligence for the remainder of World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son. 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.[6][7][8][9][10] Between 1955 and 1965 she lived in a bedsit at 13 Baldwin Crescent, Camberwell, south-east London.[11] 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 Oliveto, near to Civitella in Val di Chiana, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumours of lesbian relationships[12] 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 received nothing.[12] Spark died in 2006 and is buried in the cemetery of Sant'Andrea Apostolo in Oliveto.[13] Literary career[edit] Spark began writing seriously, under her married name, after World War II, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947 she became editor of the Poetry Review. This position made Spark one of the only female editors of the time.[14] Spark left the Poetry Review in 1948.[15] In 1953 Muriel Spark was baptised in the Church of England but in 1954 she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist.[1] 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".[16] In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing that she "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, Gabriel Fielding and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published to great critical acclaim 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)[a] was even 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.[17][18] Her residence at the Helena Club was the inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means published in 1963.[5] Muriel Spark, Poeta Archive and biography[edit] In the 1940s Spark began to keep a record of her professional and personal activities that developed into a comprehensive personal archive containing diaries, accounts and cheque books and tens of thousands of letters. Spark used her archive to write her autobiography, "Curriculum Vitae", and after its publication in 1992 much of the material was deposited at National Library of Scotland.[19] Spark refused permission for publication of a biography of her by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine holds publication approval rights, and the book was posthumously 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".[20] Honours and acclaim[edit] Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1967 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for services to literature. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent.[21] In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for a "Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".[22] Spark received eight honorary doctorates including Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995;[23] a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris causa) from the American University of Paris in 2005; and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde.[24] In 2008, The Times ranked Spark as No. 8 in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[25] In 2010, Spark was posthumously shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat. Relationship with her son[edit] Spark and her son Samuel Robin Spark at times had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Orthodox Judaism prompted him to petition for his late great-grandmother to be recognized as Jewish. (Spark's maternal grandparents, Adelaide Hyams and Tom Uezzell, had married in a church. Tom was Anglican. Adelaide's father was Jewish, but her mother was not; Adelaide referred to herself as a "Jewish Gentile.") Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.[26] Muriel's brother Philip, who himself had become actively Jewish, agreed with her version of the family's history. During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh, she told a journalist who asked if she would see her son again: "I think I know how best to avoid him by now."[27][28][29] Bibliography[edit] Novels[edit] 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[edit] 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) The French Window and the Small Telephone (limited edition, 1993) Complete Short Stories (2001) All the Poems (2004) Notes[edit] ^ The story was published in The New Yorker magazine in 1961, and was first published as a separate novel in 1962. References[edit] ^ a b Jenny Turner (17 April 2006), "Dame Muriel Spark", The Guardian. ^ "Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,' Dies at 88". The New York Times. 23 April 2010. ^ Hager 1999. ^ Spark, Muriel (1993). Curriculum Vitae. London: Penguin Books. pp. 116–7, 123–4. ^ 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. Retrieved 21 August 2011.(subscription required) ^ "Author Muriel Spark dies aged 88", BBC News, 15 April 2006. ^ "Obituary", News, BBC, 15 April 2006. ^ "Dame Muriel Spark, 1918–2006: The novelist of identity", The Weekly Standard, 1 May 2006. ^ "Spark of Genius" (magazine), Doublethink (a consideration of the author's work) (Winter), 2006. ^ "Muriel Spark". National Library of Scotland. Retrieved 15 March 2014. ^ Mount, Ferdinand, "The Go-Away Bird", The Spectator (review of Muriel Spark, the Biography by Martin Stannard), archived from the original on 18 June 2010. ^ a b "Muriel Spark leaves millions to woman friend rather than son", The Standard, 14 April 2007. ^ "Addio Muriel Spark, romanziera ironica tra Scozia e Toscana". Il Tempo. 2006. Retrieved 29 December 2017. ^ Sheridan, Susan (2009). "In the Driver's Seat: Muriel Spark's Editorship of the "Poetry Review"". Journal of Modern Literature. 32 (2): 133–142. doi:10.2979/JML.2008.32.2.133. JSTOR 25511808. ^ Sheridan, Susan (2009). "In the Driver's Seat: Muriel Spark's Editorship of the "Poetry Review"". Journal of Modern Literature. 32 (2): 133–142. doi:10.2979/JML.2008.32.2.133. JSTOR 25511808. ^ Hager, Hal (1999), "About Muriel Spark", The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, New York: Harper Perennial, p. 141. ^ "Childhood - Muriel Spark - National Library of Scotland". digital.nls.uk. Retrieved 3 February 2019. ^ Taylor, Alan (2017). Appointment in Arezzo : a friendship with Muriel Spark. Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd. ISBN 9780857903747. OCLC 1005842948. ^ "Muriel Spark archive". National Library of Scotland. Retrieved 15 March 2014. ^ "Companion shelves 'unfair' Spark biography", The Telegraph, 15 March 2016. ^ "Muriel Spark". The Man Booker Prizes. Archived from the original on 6 January 2009. ^ "Golden Pen Award" (official Website). English PEN. Retrieved 3 December 2012. ^ webperson@hw.ac.uk. "Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". www1.hw.ac.uk. Retrieved 4 April 2016. ^ Sleeman, Elizabeth (2002). The International Who's Who of Women 2002. London, England: Europa Publications. p. 540. ISBN 978-1857431223. ^ "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945", The Times, 5 January 2008, retrieved 19 February 2010. ^ "A far cry from Morningside", The Scotsman, 23 April 2006. ^ Readings, Edinburgh: Book Festival, 2004, archived from the original on 28 September 2007. ^ "Bard Mitzvah", San Diego Reader, 2 July 1998. ^ "Spark's son: I won't cash in on mum", The Scotsman, 14 May 2006 Works on Spark's writing[edit] Jardine, Penelope, ed. 2018. A Good Comb. New Directions. External links[edit] Wikiquote has quotations related to: Muriel Spark The Official Website of Dame Muriel Spark (Last Internet Archive capture of defunct website - 5 March 2016) "Archival material relating to Muriel Spark". UK National Archives. Muriel Spark on IMDb Muriel Spark personal archive at National Library of Scotland The Muriel Spark Papers at Washington University in St. Louis Muriel Spark fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections Guardian obituary, 17 April 2006 In their own words BBC interview 3 December 1971 (Video, 30 mins) Chrysalis: a poem by Muriel Spark from TLS, 17 January 2008 "Dame Muriel Spark", Fellows Remembered, The Royal Society of Literature v t e Novels by Muriel Spark 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) 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) The Only Problem (1984) A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) Symposium (1990) Reality and Dreams (1996) Aiding and Abetting (2000) The Finishing School (2004) v t e David Cohen Prize 1990s V. S. Naipaul (1993) Harold Pinter (1995) Muriel Spark (1997) William Trevor (1999) 2000s Doris Lessing (2001) Beryl Bainbridge and Thom Gunn (2003) Michael Holroyd (2005) Derek Mahon (2007) Seamus Heaney (2009) 2010s Julian Barnes (2011) Hilary Mantel (2013) Tony Harrison (2015) Tom Stoppard (2017) Authority control BIBSYS: 90073097 BNE: XX844531 BNF: cb11925313n (data) CANTIC: a11663066 GND: 118798197 ISNI: 0000 0001 2146 8612 LCCN: n80038438 LNB: 000057829 NDL: 00457240 NKC: jn19990008094 NLK: KAC199626033 NLP: A11814044 NTA: 068947224 PLWABN: 9810681211605606 SELIBR: 226686 SNAC: w6wn1jgq SUDOC: 027145832 Trove: 341420 VIAF: 108218531 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n80038438 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Muriel_Spark&oldid=999534124" Categories: 1918 births 2006 deaths Scottish Jewish writers Alumni of Heriot-Watt University Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Scottish Roman Catholics Scottish writers Ghost story writers David Cohen Prize recipients James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients People educated at James Gillespie's High School Writers from Edinburgh People from Camberwell Prix Italia winners Roman Catholic writers Scottish Catholic poets Scottish expatriates in Italy Scottish women novelists Scottish people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent 20th-century English novelists 21st-century British novelists 20th-century British women writers 21st-century British women writers Scottish women poets 20th-century Scottish poets Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Hidden categories: Pages containing links to subscription-only content Use dmy dates from July 2014 EngvarB from July 2014 Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNE identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with ISNI identifiers Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers Wikipedia articles with LNB identifiers Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers Wikipedia articles with NKC identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLK identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLP identifiers Wikipedia articles with NTA identifiers Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Languages Afrikaans العربية Asturianu Azərbaycanca تۆرکجه Български Català Čeština Cymraeg Dansk Deutsch Ελληνικά Español Esperanto Euskara فارسی Français Gàidhlig Հայերեն हिन्दी Bahasa Indonesia Italiano עברית Magyar مصرى Nederlands 日本語 ਪੰਜਾਬੀ Polski Português Русский Scots Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски Suomi Svenska Українська Edit links This page was last edited on 10 January 2021, at 17:53 (UTC). 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