Muriel Spark: The Biography

by Martin Stannard

Overview

The compelling first biography of a twentieth-century literary enigma.

Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark became the epitome of literary chic and one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, recorded her early years but politely blurred her darker moments: troubled relations with her family, a terrifying period of hallucinations, and disastrous affairs with the men she loved. At the age of nineteen, Spark left Scotland to get married in southern Rhodesia, only to divorce and escape back to Britain in 1944. Her son returned in 1945 and was brought up by Spark’s parents while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After converting to Catholicism in 1954, she began writing novels that propelled her into the literary stratosphere. These came to include Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry from Kensington.

With The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), later adapted into a successful play and film, Spark became an international celebrity and began to live half her life in New York City. John Updike, Tennessee Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene applauded her work. She had an office at The New Yorker and became friends with Shirley Hazzard and W. H. Auden. Spark ultimately settled in Italy, where for more than thirty years—until her death in 2006—she shared a house with the artist Penelope Jardine.

Spark gave Martin Stannard full access to her papers. He interviewed her many times as well as her colleagues, friends, and family members. The result is an indelible portrait of one of the most significant and emotionally complicated writers of the twentieth century. Stannard presents Spark as a woman of strong feeling, sharp wit, and unabashed ambition, determined to devote her life to her art. Muriel Spark promises to become the definitive biography of a literary icon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393051742
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/26/2010
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Martin Stannard is a professor of modern English literature at the University of Leicester, where he has taught since 1979. He was previously Leverhulme Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Muriel Spark: The Biography, Evelyn Waugh, The Early Years: 1903–1939 and Evelyn Waugh, The Later Years: 1939–1966, and editor of Evelyn Waugh, The Critical Heritage. His many articles and reviews have appeared in Modern Language Review, Essays in Criticism, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and Novel, among other publications.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface: The Cake Be Damned

1 Night and Day: 1962-1918

2 Home and Away: 1918-1937

3 Out ofAf rica: 1937-1945

4 Finding a Voice: 1945-1949

5 Kensington: 1949-1951

6 Sacramental: 1951-1954

7 Conversion: 1954-1957

8 Acquiring Lorgnettes: 1957-1959

9 Exposure: 1959-1960

10 Transfiguration: 1960-1962

11 Time / Life: 1962-1963

12 Amours de Voyage: 1963-1965

13 Looking Round: 1965-1968

14 In the Driver’s Seat: 1968-1970

15 Lucrezia Borgia in Trousers: 1971-1974

16 The Realm ofMythology: 1974-1979

17 Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye: 1979-1982

18 A Speck in the Distance: 1982-1988

19 Settling the Bill: 1988-1992

20 Dark Music: 1992-2006

Epilogue

Note on References

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Martin Stannard’s biography of Muriel Spark—dark queen of post-war British fiction and, for me at least, one of the great writers of all time—is as astonishing as his subject. In his chronicle of her rich, adverse, and inexplicable life and work he has, like a brilliant lepidopterist, managed to catch her and pin her down while preserving her elusive genius as an artist and a woman in the 20th century."

Jenny McPhee

"Will undoubtedly become the standard biography of a writer with perhaps the most distinctive voice . . . in postwar British fiction."

The Observer

"[Stannard’s] magnanimity as a biographer allows [Spark] all her apparent contradictions, while his critical attentions do just what a literary biography should do: make the reader hungry to explore her works."

Wall Street Journal - Frances Taliaferro

"A New York Times Editor's Choice: Thorough, judicious and insightful."

The New York Times - Charles McGrath

"A mistress of disguise and disappearances" is how biographer Stannard describes Muriel Spark—author of many short stories, poems, biographies, and novels—in this biography. Spark was born Muriel Camberg to working-class Scots in Edinburgh but by the Sixties was considered one of Britain's most sophisticated writers and in 1993 received the title Dame Commander of the British Empire. Nevertheless (a phrase she was most fond of), she was paradoxically as little known as she was well known. An extremely private person, Spark would not even keep a diary. So Stannard spent over a decade delving into archives, letters, and publications to piece together data from hundreds of interviews with family members, friends, and associates, but specifically with Spark herself. He contrasts the result—his enormous, almost ponderous, account—with her more modest autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. VERDICT The pages of this biography are packed so full of facts and recollections that is it difficult to perceive a straight-line account of Spark's life. Forever elusive, she probably would prefer it this way. A complex biography about a complex woman, this is a great buy for both academic and larger public libraries. [See "Prepub Exploded," BookSmack!, November 19, 2010.]—Nedra Crowe-Evers, Sonoma Cty. Lib., Santa Rosa, CA

Library Journal

Invited by Spark in 1992 to write her biography, Martin Stannard is sympathetic, perceptive and nonjudgmental…[he] is an excellent guide…to Spark's affinity with European postmodernism in general. It's not clear whether he liked Spark, but he surely admires her work, and with this meticulous biography, he has placed her among the major British writers of the postwar generation.
—The Washington Post

Elaine Showalter

Stannard is particularly good on Spark's postwar years, when she was struggling, half-starving, to make a life for herself on the fringe, or the fringe of the fringe, of literary London…The transforming event of these years was Spark's conversion to Catholicism in 1954, and Stannard's account of this is as full as any we are likely to get.
—The New York Times

Charles McGrath

Having agreed at her request to write British author Muriel Spark’s (1918-2006) biography, Stannard (Evelyn Waugh) has acquitted himself with distinction after a decade of researching the elusive author’s transformation from a socially insecure would-be poet to a sleek, elegant, literary eminence. Spark became, Stannard concludes, a “great comic artist of the macabre.” Born in working-class Edinburgh, Spark was half-Jewish, which, contends Stannard, was a source of her life-long alienation and divided personality. A hasty marriage at 18, a difficult divorce, the permanent deposition of her son to live with her own mother, not to mention a conversion to Catholicism were all prelude to Spark’s climb to literary fame, culminating in 1961 with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark, hypersensitive, liable to turn on editors and agents with fury, was also a canny businesswoman whose contractual demands taxed the patience of everyone who dealt with her. Stannard has dug deeply, and with keen and sympathetic insight. His prose is graceful and assured, his literary judgments discerning, and his biography is as definitive as we can expect to find. 16 pages of photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[Stannard’s] magnanimity as a biographer allows [Spark] all her apparent contradictions, while his critical attentions do just what a literary biography should do: make the reader hungry to explore her works.”—Frances Taliaferro, Wall Street Journal

“Stannard has dug deeply, and with keen and sympathetic insight. His prose is graceful and assured, his literary judgments discerning, and his biography is as definitive as we can expect to find.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

A New York Times Editor’s Choice: “Thorough, judicious and insightful.”—Charles McGrath

From the Publisher