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The Many Lives of Muriel Spark

It’s been said that Muriel Spark’s career was not so much a life as a plot, and she did indeed repeatedly reinvent herself, closing one chapter of her life and opening another, regardless of how many friends and business associates she abandoned along the way.

This month the Slightly Foxed team were joined by Muriel Spark’s biographer Martin Stannard, and Spark enthusiast Emily Rhodes of Emily’s Walking Book Club, to discuss the work of this highly original and somewhat forgotten writer and learn how Muriel first invited Martin to write her biography and then did her best to prevent it seeing the light of day.

Born in 1918, Muriel grew up in a working class family in Edinburgh – the setting for her most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was based on a charismatic teacher at her own school. At the age of 19 she closed that chapter of her life by marrying an older maths teacher, Sydney Oswald Spark, known (appropriately) thereafter as SOS, and going with him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where their son Robin was born. Unfortunately it soon became obvious that Sydney had severe psychiatric problems and in 1943 Muriel left husband and son and returned to London where she began her career as a novelist.

Several times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and much admired by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Muriel produced 22 novels, most of them drawing on events in her own life. Everyone at the Slightly Foxed table had their favourites, including The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington, Loitering with Intent, and Memento Mori, a clear eyed and also very funny look at old age. Everyone agreed on the brilliance of her writing with its dark humour, preoccupation with the supernatural and with the presence of evil in unlikely places.

Her life was equally fascinating, moving from poverty to great wealth and success, and from the shabbier parts of London to intellectual life in New York centred on The New Yorker magazine, to which she became a contributor. In 1954 she was received into the Roman Catholic church and for some time she lived in Rome, relishing the glitter of Italian high society, finally settling in Tuscany with her friend Penelope Jardine, where she died in 2005.

Summer reading recommendations included Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Homework by Geoff Dyer and Of Thorn and Briar by Paul Lamb. Martin also praised Electric Spark, the new – and very different – biography of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson.

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Show Notes

Books Mentioned

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles mentioned on the podcast and listed below. Please get in touch with the Slightly Foxed office for more information. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: minutes; seconds)

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Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (6:02)

Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: A Biography (7:44)

Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, Vol. 1: The Early Years (8:10)

Muriel Spark, The Comforters (21:05)

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (21:57)

Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent (23:30)

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (23:35)

Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (25:56)

Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae (35:23)

Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (46:35)

Muriel Spark, Aiding and Abetting (47:08)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (47:37)

Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (47:42) 

Frances Wilson, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (49:10)

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (53:24) 

Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook (53:29) 

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (53:36)

Daniel Kehlmann, The Director (53:45)

Geoff Dyer, Homework (54:00)

Paul Lamb, Of Thorn & Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer (55:51)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

– Divine Spark, Emma Hogan on Muriel Spark, Memento Mori; Curriculum Vitae, Issue 24

 

  • Divine Spark
    1 December 2009

    Divine Spark

    I first came across Spark when working in a little second-hand bookshop off the Charing Cross Road. A battered tome of her selected works was on sale in the outside pile, desolately stationed there to be picked over by tourists and dampened by rain. Not having much to do (the shop closed a month later, not necessarily because I’d worked there) I started reading one afternoon, and was hooked. For while Muriel Spark makes you laugh out loud, she also makes you think – she must, I feel, have been a formidable dinner-party companion, quietly sitting there with her razor-sharp tongue . . .
    Read more

Other Links

– Emily Rhodes’s Walking Book Club
– Bookbanks
– Two Moors Festival
– Bodies in the Bookshop

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach

Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich


Comments & Reviews

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  1. Stephanie Giesen says:

    Hi Rosie, just listened to your Muriel Spark podcast and greatly enjoyed it. You sound wonderful as presenter. A very interesting mix of voices and opinions and lots of good info about this gifted and challenging woman . I must now read Girls of slender means again. And Memento Mori. And of course the biography by Martin Stannard!

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