A Companion to the British and Irish

Novel 1945–2000
Edited by Brian W. Shaffer

ß 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

except for editorial material and organizationß 2005 by Brian W. Shaffer

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA

Born in 1918, Dame Muriel Spark was nearly 40 years of age when she completedThe
Comforters(1957), her first novel. Over the next five decades, she published twenty-
two novels, three volumes of short stories, and the occasional play, collection of poetry,
and children’s work. The phenomenal success of Spark’s sixth novel,The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie(1961) – as a stage-play, feature film, and television series – has ensured
that she retains a popular appeal. After gaining innumerable literary prizes and academic
awards, she is now widely considered one of the most enthralling writers of her
generation. What is extraordinary about Spark’s achievement is that as well as having a
large international readership she manages to engage with many of the most serious
intellectual issues of her time. It is typical of her work that it both gestures towards and
acknowledges many of the debates and concerns of the age without, ever, being wholly
reliant on them.
Spark gained a good deal from avant-garde movements such as the Frenchnouveau
romanof Alain Robbe-Grillet and the British ‘‘experimentalism’’ of B. S. Johnson and
Christine Brooke-Rose in the 1950s and 1960s; the feminist writing of the 1970s; and
postmodern and magical realist fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, she has
continued the long tradition of British social realism and literary satire in much of her
work and has placed these more conventional modes alongside the avant- garde ones. But
what is clear from even a cursory reading of Spark’s dazzling and cunning fictions is that
she only ever engages with these various literary modes insofar as they can be subsumed
by her unique vision. Spark’s quirky and playful voice refuses to be contained by any
single doctrine. Her abiding doubleness, above all, places a sense of history, tradition, and
the avant-garde next to an irreverent and whimsical sense of the absurdity of all human
philosophies.
Spark’s ability to subsume in her fictions the larger cultural questions of her day is in part
a consequence of her formative years as a literary critic. Along with a collection of poetry,
her books in the early 1950s consisted of a tribute to William Wordsworth; a reassessment
of Mary Shelley and a selection of her letters; editions of the poems and letters of Emily
Bronte¨; and an account of John Masefield. Spark might well have continued as a critic
and occasional poet if it were not for the publication of ‘‘The seraph and the Zambesi’’
(1951), which won theObserver short story prize. This story made such a profound impact
that it literally transformed Spark’s life. After it was published, she was immediately
introduced to the editor and staff ofThe Observer and began writing occasionally for the
newspaper. Because she was poverty-stricken and unwell at the time, Graham Greene
offered to support her financially and was an influential patron. More importantly, ‘‘The
seraph and the Zambesi’’ attracted the attention of Alan Maclean, the fiction editor of
Macmillan, who commissioned her to write a novel and a collection of short stories,
which subsequently becameThe
Comfortersand The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories(1958), respectively. Such was
Spark’s meteoric rise as a writer of fiction.

Spark’s twenty-two novels reflect her competing fictional identities as both an unchanging
moralist and a playfully anarchic one. The reason that she is equally well known as a
Scottish-Jewish writer, Catholic convert, and poetic modernist is that she has managed to
defy all of these categories. Her fictions are tantalizing precisely because they are able to
sustain such radically different readings, and this applies especially to her most
accomplished achievements, such asThe Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie. The key to understanding Spark’s fiction is to recognize that it is constantly in

dialogue with itself, and that each of her novels, or groups of novels, zigzags between her
converted and unconverted selves. After initially descending into the murky world of
private emotions and unconverted history in her first two novels, she eventually found
refuge behind an impersonal and godlike narrator in her neoclassical third novel,Memento
Mori (1959). This pattern was continued throughout her career.
More unruly books,The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) andThe Prime of Miss Jean
Brodiequickly followed her early didactic tales such as Memento Mori. If her novels

became too impersonal – as inThe Driver’s Seat (1970) andNot to Disturb (1971) – she
wrote anarchic works such asThe Abbess of Crewe (1974) andThe Takeover (1976), or
ostensibly autobiographical books such asLoitering with Intent (1981) andA Far Cry
from Kensington(1988). Spark’s abundant gifts are such that she has refused to rest on

her laurels. Always shifting in time, from the 1940s to the 1990s, her fiction has
encompassed Rhodesia, Edinburgh, and Jerusalem, and has rotated between London, New
York, and Rome. But no one time, place, or culture has been allowed to delimit Spark’s
imagination. It is in these terms that Spark’s hybrid background – part English, part
Scottish, part Protestant, part Jewish – has enabled her to become an essentially diasporic
writer with a double vision (Cheyette: 2000).
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodieremains one of Spark’s finest achievements and,

although the film and play tend to flatten out the complexity of the written text, it remains
one of her most compelling works. While the novel has been frequently read for a single,
didactic meaning, it should be placed in the context of the self- questioning and
doubleness that characterizes her best works. The book that most closely resemblesThe
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is, in many ways, the largely unsung
The Ballad of Peckham Rye(1960), with its antihero Dougal Douglas or Douglas Dougal.
This comparison is often obscured by the phenomenal success of Spark’s sixth novel. But
both works have deceptively attractive and forceful protagonists whose Scottishness
defines their difference from convention and helps proclaim their anarchic presence.
These determinedly amoral figures paradoxically act as a catalyst to elicit the spiritual life
 of others. They both exist as witty and alluring personalities who, in a skillful sleight-of-
hand, appear to elude the author’s narrative control. Such rampant singularity means that
Dougal Douglas and Jean Brodie attempt, not unlike their author, to determine reality. The
fact that the figure of Jean Brodie can be so easily extracted from an elaborate and closely
textured story-line points to Spark’s overpowering fascination with her. That Brodie exists
so completely beyond the written text is especially startling when we remember that the
novel, more than any other that she had written to date, is distinguished on the page, as
opposed to the stage or screen, by a fragmented and continually shifting narrative.
Yet as soon as one compares her later and earlier works it becomes clear that
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, along with The Girls of Slender Means(1963) and The
Mandelbaum Gate(1965), achieve a level of literary sophistication that eclipses much
of what has gone before. Unlike her previous novels, Spark now takes seriously the
question of locale and historical context. If her first five novels could easily have been
situated anywhere at just about any time,The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie could only have
been set in Edinburgh in the 1930s. As withThe Girls of Slender Means andThe
Mandelbaum Gate, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodieis also directly related to the history of
fascism and the aftermath of war. Unlike these contemporaneous works, however,The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodiealso introduces the first sustained use of Spark’s distinctive
flash-forward technique, to accompany her more conventional use of flashbacks, which
complicates any straightforward reading of the novel. As her narrative style becomes more
complex, so does the range and depth of her interests.
Continuity between Spark’s earlier and later writing is found in her abiding sense of
death-in-life or of suffering as the foundation of creativity. An important link with
bothMemento Mori andThe Bachelors is the often-stressed fact that Brodie, as a result of
the carnage of the First World War, is one of a large number of Edinburgh spinsters.
It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point in her prime... She was
alone, merely, in that she taught in a school like Marcia Blaine’s. There were legions of
her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty upward, who crowded
their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic
practices in art or social welfare, education or religion. (Spark 1961: 42)

Instead of showing humility in the face of death on a mass scale, Brodie acts as if she were
immortal, not unlike many of the benighted septuagenarians inMemento Mori. What is more, she
also weaves unreal fantasies out of her spinsterly solitude, which leads to solipsism and the
creation of a private dream world. But Spark, needless to say, did not call this novelThe Spinsters
afterThe Bachelors. While Brodie might not be

the values of clarity and order that are personified by Sandy Stranger. In her contem- poraneous
story, ‘‘Bang-bang you’re dead’’ (1961), Spark’s protagonist Sybil asks, ‘‘am I a woman . . . or an
intellectual monster?’’ (1994: 85) and the same question can be asked of Sandy Stranger. For all
of her crypto-fascist control of her girls, Brodie, on the other hand, hates anything that smacks of
‘‘the team spirit’’ (1961: 78), which is authoritarian and diminishes human individuality. After all,
Brodie’s definition of education is ‘‘a leading out,’’ ‘‘fromex out andduco, I lead’’ (p. 36). This is
an essentially liberal version of education from below as opposed to the imposition of knowledge
on her pupils from above. But,ex duco, of course, is similar to Il Duce, the title that Mussolini
adopts. Brodie, in these terms, is paradoxically both a liberal and a fascist cliche´ – the
freethinking schoolteacher who both inspires and dominates her pupils – and Spark clearly wanted
to subvert such easy approval or disapproval.

The unattractive Sandy, on the other hand, is a rather one-dimensional figure, as suggested by
her allegorical surname, Stranger, even though she is ostensibly sup- posed to embody the novel’s
truths. While Sandy’s crisis of belief and coming of age drive the action of the plot, we gain very
little insight into her reasons for her conversion and we know absolutely nothing about her ‘‘odd
psychological treatise’’ (p. 35), except that it finally made her famous. As Bernard Harrison
rightly argues, the story-line might well be organized around Sandy but she remains ‘‘enigmatic
and incomplete’’ and is treated throughout the novel as if she were a peripheral figure (Harrison
1991: 154). In Spark’s previous works, mono-dimensional characters with- out any inner life are
automatically dismissed as moral degenerates. Sandy, however, is both a disagreeable caricature
and close to being an authorial mouthpiece. She is half-English, like Spark, a ‘‘stranger’’ to
Edinburgh, and has a ‘‘creeping vision of disorder’’ (Spark 1961: 86) that her conversion is meant
to resolve. Although she shares a portion of Spark’s life history, she is the most unlovable of
heroines and, when she dismisses Brodie as a ‘‘tiresome woman’’ (p. 60), the reader’s sympathy
is undoubtedly on the side of her more seductive and nuanced teacher.

It is in relation to Sandy’s conversion to Catholicism that the conventional orthodox reading

ofThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Spark’s fiction as a whole, can be challenged. Spark’s anti-
determinism, in response to Calvinism, is especially troubling when placed next to the
conversionist narrative that surrounds both her and Sandy as a ‘‘Catholic writer’’ and convert to
the Catholic faith. The convert, in this orthodox reading, is meant to close off one set of
possibilities, and one version of the self, and to embrace a radically new and all-
encompassingweltanschauung. Spark’s fiction has, as a consequence, been read as a ‘‘spiritual
autobiography’’ that distin- guishes, above all, between the self before and after conversion. Each
novel, according to this interpretation, becomes a kind of ongoing conversion, transforming the
author anew, and distancing her from her previous self (Whittaker 1982; Randisi 1991). The
abiding problem with thinking of Spark in this way is that it tends to set up an overly simple
model of conversion that unproblematically splits the self into old and new, before and after, inner
and outer. Conversion, that is, is turned into another form of determinism, or merely a self-
congratulatory act of redemption. Sandy’s abiding

Muriel Spark’sThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

373

memory of the irresolvable presence of Miss Jean Brodie and the influence that she has had on her
is especially subversive, in these orthodox terms, after she has been ‘‘transfigured’’ through her
conversion. Although Sandy’s new self is meant to have transcended her old self, she remains,
paradoxically, enraptured with her past.
 Those critics who have noted Spark’s double conversion – to Roman Catholicism and to novel
writing – have argued mistakenly that these coexisting transformations are somehow equivalent
(Bradbury 1987). Instead of assuming that there is an organic coherence between her religion and
her art, Gauri Viswanathan has maintained that religious conversion, far from being a unitary
form of exchange, is a model of ‘‘dissent.’’ In her reading, conversion is primarily a form of
doubleness that ‘‘destabil- izes’’ modern society as it ‘‘crosses fixed boundaries between
communities and identities’’ (1998: xvii). According to this argument, the mixing of two different
religions or cultures inevitably creates a sense in which any one ideology can be viewed from an
estranged or defamiliarized perspective. This is precisely what Sandy Stranger does inThe Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie. In these heterodox terms, far from merely superseding the past, conversion is
seen primarily as an interpretative act that perceives one world through the eyes of another.
Sandy, for instance, reinterprets the presence of Miss Jean Brodie as a parodic form of spiritual
transfiguration, while her Catholicism is observed with an artist’s skeptical eye. Rather than being
an all-encompassing orthodoxy, conversion in the novel becomes a form of heterodoxy that
multiplies endlessly the official or didactic version of Miss Jean Brodie.

As with the doubled and redoubled Dougal Douglas or Douglas Dougal, Brodie is equally
attractive and dangerous and impossible to pin down according to a self- evident moral schema.
Such uncertainties are initially resolved by identifying her with her famous ancestor, Deacon
William Brodie, a respectable ‘‘man of substance’’ who was a ‘‘night burglar,’’ a bigamist, and
died ‘‘cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising’’ (p. 88). As Velma Richmond has noted,
William Brodie was the historical source for Robert Louis Stevenson’sThe Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which is also centrally concerned with the doubleness of its
protagonist (Richmond 1984: 26). For this reason, unlike in Spark’s earlier fiction, there is no
simple redemptive closure inThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, even when Edinburgh is viewed in
passing as a ‘‘floating city when the light was a special pearly white’’ (p. 111). This, as the
narrator makes clear, is just one of a large number of versions of the city and of Brodie, who
looked ‘‘beautiful and fragile’’ in this light (p. 111). Thus Sandy ends the novel by repeating the
refrain that ‘‘Miss Jean Brodie in her prime’’ (p. 128) was an important influence on her life. But
we know from what has gone before that Brodie’s prime – ‘‘Prime what?’’ (p. 27) – is a
particularly vague notion, as this word is both a noun and an adjective. In a typical paradox,
Brodie herself objects to exactly this kind of linguistic vagueness: ‘‘Social what?,’’ she responds,
when one of her girls says that she is going to ‘‘a social’’ (p. 62).

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodieis a deliberately uncertain rendition of a figure who
is definedpar excellence by her astonishing, if misplaced, certainties. The reason
why Sandy’s famous treatise, ‘‘The transfiguration of the commonplace,’’ is left
374
Bryan Cheyette

unexplained is that Spark allows her readers to tease out the truth about Brodie and engage in an
act of aesthetic transformation themselves. Like Brodie, Spark does not wish to impose meaning
from above, but leaves ‘‘the nature of moral perception’’ (p. 35) to her individual readers. The
Marcia Baine School provided Spark with a circumscribed social grouping that she could
simultaneously document, mytholo- gize, and debunk. But the same could be said of Sandy
Stranger’s conversion into a Catholic nun called Sister Helena of the Transfiguration. In the
context of such spiritual transformation, ‘‘Miss Jean Brodie in her prime’’ (p. 128) is a peculiarly
ambiguous influence. Is this a reference to Brodie’s moral prime, as it should be, or to her
pedagogic or mythomanical prime? It is this unresolved clash of two different kinds of
transformation – one aesthetic, one religious – that is to be found not only in

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodiebut in Spark’s fiction as a whole.

RE F E R E N C E S A N D FU R T H E R RE A D I N G
Bernstein, Michael Andre´ (1994)Foregone Conclu-
sions: Against Apocalyptic History.Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Bradbury, Malcolm (1987)No, Not Bloomsbury.
London: Arena.
Cheyette, Bryan (2000)Muriel Spark: Writers and
Their Work.Tavistock, Devon: Northcote
House.
Harrison, Bernard (1991)Literature and the Limits
of Theory.New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lodge, David (1971)The Novelist at the Crossroads.
London: Routledge.
McQuillan, Martin (ed.) (2002)Theorising Muriel
Spark: Gender, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction.
London: Macmillan.
Randisi, Jennifer Lynn (1991)On Her Way Rejoi-
cing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark.Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Richmond, Velma Bourgeois (1984)Muriel Spark.
New York: Frederick Ungar.
Spark, Muriel (1951)Child of Light: A Reassessment
of Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley.Hadleigh: Tower
Bridge Publications.
—— (1952)The Fanfarlo and Other Verse. Alding-
ton, Kent: The Hand and Flower Press.
——(1953)John Masefield. London: Peter
Nevill.
—— (1957)The Comforters. London: Macmillan.
—— (1959)Memento Mori. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
—— (1960a)The Bachelors. London: Macmillan.
—— (1960b)The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London:
Macmillan.
—— (1961)The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—— (1963)The Girls of Slender Means. London:
Macmillan.
—— (1965)The Mandelbaum Gate. London:
Macmillan.

—— (1968)The Public Image. London: Macmillan. —— (1970)The Driver’s Seat. London: Macmillan. ——
(1971)Not to Disturb. London: Macmillan. —— (1974)The Abbess of Crewe. London:

Macmillan.
—— (1976)The Takeover. London: Macmillan.
—— (1981)Loitering with Intent. London: Bodley
Head.
—— (1988)A Far Cry from Kensington. London:
Constable.
—— (1994)The Collected Stories of Muriel Spark.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Spark, Muriel and Stanford, Derek (eds.) (1950)
Tribute to Wordsworth: A Miscellany of Opinion for
the Centenary of the Poet’s Death.London:
Wingate.
—— and—— (eds.) (1953)Emily Bronte¨: Her Life
and Work.London: Peter Owen.
Whittaker, Ruth (1982)The Faith and Fiction of
Muriel Spark.London: Macmillan.
Viswanathan, Gauri (1998)Outside the Fold:
Conversion, Modernity, and Belief.Princeton:
Princeton University Press

In Muriel Spark's novels springtime does become political: anti-

structure figures — the artists, bachelors, radical teachers, pilgrims,
servants, and other "outsiders" — invade tradition, overturn the
mind or the heart or the institution, and leave the formerly trust-
worthy realities lurching as alarmingly as jarred stage scenery.
Spark's comic novels are traditional in that they employ the liminal
patterns of inversion, life crisis, or festivity, but these patterns are
used in massively concentrated doses, and the novels do not finally
circle back to an affirmation of the old order — the old order scrutin-

ized and renewed but still the old order. The characters, who have
often adventurously and deliberately set out on some daring psy-
chological pilgrimage, tend to remain in awkward exile from them-
selves: a cloistered nun gripping the bars that separate her from the
world, a comic and anguished ghost searching for death, or a one-
time seminary student still chafing at his surprise vocation, that of a
"first-rate epileptic." In the fictional worlds created by Spark,
there is always something like the Fall; something is disastrously
overturned.

Spark's first eight novels deal primarily with the overturning

of a psyche; but in the last seven novels, the landscape is larger,
more social (even "global," to quote the glib investment shyster of
The Takeover), and the action elaborates the overturning of eco-
nomic institutions and social conventions. Virginia Woolf's Isa
Oliver had hoped vaguely for a radical "new plot," and Miss La
Trobe's play held broken mirrors up to the old. In the fiction of
Spark the diffident artists Lily and La Trobe are replaced by artist-
outlaws corrupted by a sinister confidence or sheer faith; the outsid-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and
Feminism. Contributors: Judy Little - author. Publisher: University of Nebraska Press. Place
of Publication: Lincoln, NE. Publication Year: 1983. Page Number: 99.
Muriel Spark: Takeovers

Not until The Takeover do we find anything like the good cheer of
The Mandelbaum Gate, and never, in Sparks's last eight novels, is a
character again interiorized as fully as Barbara Vaughan is. Instead
of the motifs of initiation, so often present in Spark's use of the con-
vert character, the social motifs of liminality appear. The inverted
values of festivity, or of social and economic sabotage, become the
moving forces behind the comedy. Often both festivity and social
attack occur at once; a countercultural group will fiddle while Rome
burns. For instance, the media artists, the mod servants, celebrate
the aristocratic family's inevitable demise in Not To Disturb. In-
stead of the quest, the major narrative metaphor becomes the
party, the holiday, the celebration of an overthrow. Parties are scat-
tered throughout the later novels; there is much dancing and din-
ing, while the burglary, murder, suicide, or "takeover" is com-
pleted. In the earlier novels an individual, or several people as foils
or parallels, searched for identity. In the last seven novels, society is
searching for identity, and the mockery is as radical politically as it
is ethically and psychologically.

Spark has said that those who, like herself, grew up in the
primitive landscape of Edinburgh's castle and crag, generally
viewed the Whitehall government "as just a bit ridiculous"; she im-
bibed from Edinburgh "its haughty and remote anarchism." She
draws the following conclusion; "I can never now suffer from a shat-

tered faith in politics and politicians, because I never had any." 1

Never had any? This is going a large step further than merely argu-
ing that Hitler's oppressive politics should be ridiculed. A tone of
haughty and remote anarchism could well describe Spark's narra-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism.
Contributors: Judy Little - author. Publisher: University of Nebraska Press. Place of Publication:
Lincoln, NE. Publication Year: 1983. Page Number: 147.

Undue Influence in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

Cristie L.March

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie details the intimate relationship between six
school-age girls and their teacher and mentor, Miss Brodie, as the girls move from an all-
girl primary school and secondary school into their adult lives. In the process, Spark
explores both the powerful role of authority figures such as Miss Brodie in the identity
formation of young girls, and the development of sexual desire and religious conviction.
Spark’s non-chronological narrative allows the reader to see how the girls develop into
adults, revealing Miss Brodie’s eventual betrayal to the school board by her most trusted
student, Sandy, and Sandy’s entry into a convent. The interaction between Miss Brodie and
Sandy explores the ambiguity between right and wrong as Sandy first emulates, then
resists, then betrays the influential and possessive Miss Brodie.

Miss Brodie wields great power as an authority figure and role model for her students. A
greater presence in their middle-class lives than their mothers are, she recognizes her
ability to influence the direction of their futures. “Give me a young girl at an
impressionable age, and she is mine for life,” she proudly proclaims (9). Through Miss
Brodie and her teachings, Spark illustrates larger issues of social unrest afoot in Scotland.
While Miss Brodie embraces alternative social models such as the then-young fascist
movements of Mussolini and Franco, she clings to romantic images of feminine self-
sacrifice and unrequited love. She embodies a first generation of women who attempt to
move out of conventional gender roles while at the same time remain confined by their
own conservative upbringings.

As a result, Miss Brodie calls on her authority over her “impressionable” students in order
to urge them into roles she herself is too afraid to occupy. For example, Miss Brodie
convinces Joyce Emily to join her brother in the

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Gender. Contributors: Jerilyn Fisher - editor, Ellen S. Silber - editor. Publisher: Greenwood
Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2003. Page Number: 240.
Muriel Spark 1918-

Frank Kelly

Muriel Sparkhas produced a substantial body of work—twenty novels, plus stories, poetry,
drama, literary criticism, and biography—in which she considers, in lean, gemlike, ironic
prose and plots of surpassing ingenuity, the social interaction of people and through them
the moral and cultural concerns of the twentieth century. Though many of her works are
set in Great Britain, other novels and stories focus on political and ethical dilemmas in
South Africa and Europe, particularly Italy, as well. A realist who includes spirituality,
even religion, in her reality, she often experiments with the literary forms in which she is
working.

BACKGROUND

In a personal interview poet John Masefield told Muriel Spark, then thirty-two years old,
“All experience is good for an artist” (Curriculum Vitae [CV] 197). Spark's eminence
among twentieth-century British writers may be traced in part to the unusual variety of
social, cultural, and religious experiences that have informed her life and work.

She was born Muriel Uezzell Camberg in the Morningside district of Edinburgh, Scotland,
on February 1, 1918. Her father Bernard was a Scottish-Jewish engineer who had refused
to change his name to Camber, as the rest of his family had done. Her mother Sarah was
English. The small but telling differences between her mother's speech, dress, and manner
and those of her Edinburgh neighbors were among Spark's most vivid childhood
observations.

She felt an early affinity with fellow Edinburgher Robert Louis Stevenson, whose A
Child's Garden of Verses was among the first books she owned. She spent twelve years at
James Gillespie's High School for Girls, the basis for the Marcia Blaine School in Spark's
most famous work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Sparkwas a Jew in a school whose
official religion was Presbyterian, but other Jews, Catholics, and girls of mixed faith
attended as well. “In my day Tolerance was decidedly the prevailing religion, always with
a puritanical slant” (CV 53). At Gillespie's Sparkencountered the teacher Miss Christina
Kay, the model for Jean Brodie, and immediately began to write about her. Kay's
enthusiasm for foreign locales and culture in many forms also shows up in Spark's life and
work. She saw John Masefield read aloud; twenty years later she wrote a bookabout him.
She memorized the Border ballads; her own poetry brought her prizes while she was still in
school. The fact that Spark's maternal grandmother lived with her family for the

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Contributors: Vicki K. Janik - editor, Del Ivan Janik - editor. Publisher: Greenwood Press.
Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 315.
 

MURIEL SPARK:
THE SURREALIST JANE AUSTEN

Charles Alva Hoyt

IN 1957 a remarkable first novel, The Comforters, ap-

peared, swollen with every sort of excess: exuberance, flum-

mery, treachery, witchcraft, smuggling, fanaticism, thiev-

ery, madness, magic, irony, death. The literary world was
overwhelmed, carried quite off its feet. As one reviewer
said later, "I cannot quite see how it was done, but the
transformation of Muriel Spark from a minor poetess into
one of the most distinguished novelists writing today is a
remarkable literary phenomenon." Mrs. Spark's metamor-
phosis was superficially at least as dazzling and as quick as
the movement of her own fiction. Unlike Byron, however,
 another poet whose life the critics sometimes confuse with
his art, she did not awake one morning to find herself
famous. For all her easy conquest of the reviewers, her
reputation among the general public has been moving at a
measured pace, from mouth to mouth as new readers
discover her. She gives the curious effect of being one's
own personal property; surely, one thinks, a talent so
unique cannot appeal to the mass audience. Such snobbery
to one side, it is right and proper that Mrs. Spark evoke an
Augustan response. For despite her Byronesque feats
among the critics, despite her exuberance, flummery, mad-
ness, and magic, she has little of the Romantic about her.
No matter how the plot may rage, or the characters
threaten, even though reality itself totter on a ledge, the

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Publication Information: Book Title: Contemporary British Novelists. Contributors: Charles

Shapiro - author. Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press. Place of Publication:
Carbondale, IL. Publication Year: 1965. Page Number: 125.

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Publication Information: Book Title: Ethically Speaking: Voice and Values in Modern
Scottish Writing. Contributors: James McGonigal - editor, Kirsten Stirling - editor. Publisher:
Rodopi. Place of Publication: Amsterdam. Publication Year: 2006. Page Number: 199.

Three
The Deliberate Cunning of Muriel Spark

Ian Rankin

Throughout the mid- and late 1960s, Muriel Spark sought contem-
poraneity: a rejection perhaps of the popular success of The Prime of Miss
 Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), which had
been praised in turn for their protrayal of the 1930S and 1940S.

So, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) tackled the Arab/Israeli conflict,

while The Public Image (1968) cast a cynical eye on the contemporary
film industry. By 1970, Spark seemed to have redefined the goal of her
books, what their themes and concerns were to be, and, as importantly,
how they were to be written. Her early novels, despite their often
macabre subject matter, were classed as comedies, but from Brodie
through to The Public Image that comedy had been whittled away, and
by the time of The Driver's Seat (1970) there is precious little to smile
about.

The shift in Spark's perspective seems to be from what might be

termed a peculiarly secular Catholicism to Christian Absurdism. A
character in her 1973 novel The Hothouse by the East River says: 'There's
only one area of conflict left and that's between absurdity and
intelligence', while Spark herself, in a 1970 interview, admits: 'I don't
believe in good and evil so much any more. . . . Now, there is only
absurdity and intelligence.' 1 This idea is fleshed out in a speech given
the same year to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a speech
explaining the task Spark sets herself in the 1970S.

Spark begins the speech (published as "'The Desegregation of Art'") by

stating the importance, the primacy even of literature as an artistic
form. But it should not be 'a special department set aside for the
entertainment and delight of the sophisticated minority' -- it should be
desegregated. 2 'Ineffective literature,' she says, 'must go', but in a
Platonic twist this means that

-41-
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Publication Information: Book Title: The Scottish Novel since the Seventies: New Visions, Old
Dreams. Contributors: Gavin Wallace - editor, Randall Stevenson - editor. Publisher: Edinburgh
University Press. Place of Publication: Edinburgh. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 41.