Muriel Sarah Spark (born 1918) wrote biography, literary criticism, poetry, and fiction, including the novel that was considered her masterpiece, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Born in Edinburgh on February 1, 1918, Muriel Spark worked in the Political...

Muriel Spark came to the novel after a variety of writing experiences. As a free-lance journalist after her intelligence work in World War II, Spark wrote for the Argentor, a jewelry trade magazine, and she had poetry published before she became...

Although she is known primarily as a prolific novelist, Muriel Spark began her writing career with a short story. Her first published work of fiction, "The Seraph and the Zambesi" (Observer, December 1951; collected in The Go-Away Bird with Other...

Dame Muriel Spark, novelist, died on April 13th, aged 88 AS SHE lay on the divan in her flat in Queen's Gate, Caroline Rose suddenly heard the sound of a typewriter. Tap-tappity-tap. It seemed to come through the wall on her...

DAME MURIEL SPARK, born in 1938 in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been a professional writer since the 1940s. The author of nearly fifty novels, plays, nonfiction studies, and poetry and short-story collections, she made her publishing debut with Child of Light, a biography of...

at Makor brought another demurral, on points large and small, from Triangle author Katharine Weber: I did not say "cramped," but crammed. My mother being raised in a Protestant identity bubble by her Protestant mother, despite being a Warburg in New York City,...

In 1957, when Spark was 39 and unknown, someone at the English publisher Hamish Hamilton sent along to a friend at The New Yorker a startling story that had lately been published (in a magazine called Botteghe Oscure) by an unknown called Muriel Spark. "The...

Here are some reasons for disliking the novels of Muriel Spark. First, that she is, as the mother of a friend of mine put it, a girl of slender means. Her books are too spun-out. They seem all surface, and a rather dry, sparsely furnished, though elegant and mannered surface at that. The one exception is The Mandelbaum Gate, which offers us, as the blurb-writers say, a vivid panorama of contemporary Israel. But there, if you like, is a book which lacks moral profundity. A serious young man once told me that...

It is probably impossible to read several of Muriel Spark's novels without realizing that her Roman Catholicism is much more than an item of biographical interest: it is a potent force which has profoundly affected the shape of her art. For Miss Spark does not stop short at simply bringing the question of Catholicism into her work; she has chosen to place the traditionally Christian outlook at the very heart of everything she writes. This "outlook" is perhaps best illustrated by one of ...

Muriel Spark, in a series of tightly organized, sharply pointed novels, has achieved, with an amazing degree of illumination, translations of vast abstractions into crisp, containing modern terms, never losing the necessary qualities of suggestiveness and humility. For she has tackled the most difficult translation of all…. She has obviously set herself the task of bringing good and evil over into concrete objects of consideration and into explicit situations. It is a temptation to say that she is ne...