Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Spark | |
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File:Muriel Spark 1960.jpg
Spark in 1960
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Born | Muriel Sarah Camberg 1 February 1918 Edinburgh, Scotland |
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. 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) |
Partner | Penelope Jardine |
Children | 1 |
Website | |
murielspark100 |
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark DBE, CLit, FRSE, FRSL (née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006)[1] was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.
Contents
Life
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, and came from Lithuania (part of the Russian Empire at the time) and her mother had been raised a Presbyterian, as was Muriel.[1][3] She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls (1923–35).[4] 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.[5]
On 3 September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). 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 Robin. She returned to Britain in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London.[6] 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.[7][8][9][10][11]
Between 1955 and 1965 she lived in a bedsit at 13 Baldwin Crescent, Camberwell, south-east London.[12] 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[13] 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.[13]
Spark died in 2006 and is buried in the cemetery of Sant'Andrea Apostolo in Oliveto.[14]
Literary career
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.[15] Spark left the "Poetry Review" in 1948[16]. 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".[17] 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 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)[lower-alpha 1] 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.[18][19] 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.[6]
Archive and biography
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.[20]
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".[21]
Honours and acclaim
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.[22] In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for a "Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".[23]
Spark received eight honorary doctorates including Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995;[24] 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.[25]
In 2008, The Times ranked Spark as No. 8 in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[26] In 2010, Spark was posthumously shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat.
Relationship with her son
Spark and her son Robin at times had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Orthodox Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognised as Jewish. (Spark's maternal grandparents, Adelaide Hyams and Tom Uezzell, had married in a church; it was unclear whether both of Adelaide's parents were Jewish.)[27] Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.[28] 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".[29][30][31]
Bibliography
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)
- The French Window and the Small Telephone (limited edition, 1993)
- Complete Short Stories (2001)
- All the Poems (2004)
Notes
- ↑ The story was published in The New Yorker magazine in 1961, and was first published as a separate novel in 1962.
References
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- ↑ "Spark's son: I won't cash in on mum", The Scotsman, 14 May 2006
Works on Spark's writing
Jardine, Penelope, ed. 2018. A Good Comb. New Directions.
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Muriel Spark |
- The Official Website of Dame Muriel Spark (Last Internet Archive capture of defunct website - 5 March 2016)
- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- Muriel Spark at the Internet Movie Database
- 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
- Pages containing links to subscription-only content
- Use dmy dates from July 2014
- EngvarB from July 2014
- Pages with broken file links
- 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