New York, Rome and Tuscany. Her engaging and ingenious novels are often set in
largely female institutions – a hospital ward, a hostel, an office, a school, a convent –
where personal destiny and value are at stake, and bizarre happenings are recounted
with spry amusement. The pattern of the plot belongs to what may be called the
intellectual Gothic tradition, overlaid by an amusing layer of the comedy-of-
manners familiar in the domestic novel. Her style is quick, but she can lightly suggest
darker and deeper things. Like Greene and Waugh, who backed her after her
Memento Mori brought her to public attention at the start of her career, she found
in her Catholic faith a means of controlling a temperament drawn to extremes. In
conversation, she did not believe in taking prisoners. Although early in her career
she wrote studies of the ‘intellectual Gothicists’ Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë, she
was not a reliable praiser of other women writers. Her obituary reported her verdict
on Virginia Woolf: ‘A spoilt brat. All right, she committed suicide, but she didn’t have
to take the dog with her.’
Her best known novel, thanks to a film, is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: a charis-
matic mistress at an Edinburgh day school for girls uses her hold over her pupils to
make them fulfil her heroic and romantic fantasies. When one of the girls is killed
on her way to the Spanish Civil War, Miss Brodie is reported by a member of the set
and dismissed. In ‘putting a stop’ to Miss Brodie, however, her betrayer has imitated
her mistress in trying to play God. The costs and benefits of moral choices remain
sharply unreconciled. Muriel Spark’s many books are all distinguished by the verbal
economy which characterises British fiction at its best. In A Far Cry from Kensington
(a novel set in the world of London publishing in which she once worked), a writer
who is the bane of the protagonist’s life is called un pisseur de copie– an incontinent
supplier of unwanted copy. (‘Copy’ is a term for text to be sent to the printers.)
Dame Muriel Spark is Scotland’s best novelist since the war, and higher claims than
this have been made for her work. A more recent Catholic novelist who also worked390 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80
Muriel Spark(b. Moura
Camburg, Edinburgh 1918; d.
Italy 2006) Studies of Mary
Shelley (1951) and Emily
Brontë (1953), The Fanfarlo
and Other Verse(1952), J. H.
Newman’s Letters(ed.,
1957), The Comforters
(1957), Robinson(1958),
Memento Mori(1959), The
Ballad of Peckham Rye
(1960), The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie(1961), Girls of
Slender Means(1963), The
Mandelbaum Gate(1965),
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), also other
novels, short stories,
children’s stories, and poetry.
Dame of the British Empire,
- Awarded the David
Cohen Literature Prize for a
lifetime’s achievement, 1997
Muriel Spark at about 30, when
she resigned as Secretary of the
Poetry Society. Popperfoto/Getty
Images.