Biography EssayMuriel 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 t...
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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 Feb...
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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, a...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Harold W. Schneider
[Muriel Spark's short] stories represent a lesser achievement than her novels, particularly the pieces in … Voices at Play. On the surface this wri...
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Critical Essay by John Hazard Wildman
Muriel Spark, in a series of tightly organized, sharply pointed novels, has achieved, with an amazing degree of illumination, translations of vast abstractions i...
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Critical Essay by Victor Kelleher
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 inte...
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Critical Essay by David Lodge
When a novelist embeds quotations from some fictitious novel in his/her own text [as Muriel Spark does in Territorial Rights], it is, of course, always with aesthetic in...
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Critical Essay by Francis King
From Thomas Mann to Patricia Highsmith and from Henry James to Daphne du Maurier, Venice has not merely exerted a potent fascination on novelists but has brought out th...
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Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
There is certainly a remoteness, a lack of ordinary compassion, in [Mrs Spark's] dealings with characters, but this is part of the premise of her fiction; if we...
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Critical Essay by Bernard Harrison
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...
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Critical Essay by Edmund White
Sometimes it seems that writers who can write can't tell a story and those who can tell a story can't write. Because of the unfortunate division in our ce...
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Critical Essay by Cynthia Propper Seton
It may not be true, but I have the feeling that Muriel Spark is one of the few, in the category of fine writers, who has a grand time at her work. This is not ...
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Critical Essay by Thomas R. Brooks
Edmund Wilson once remarked that "the English do not insist on having the women in their fiction made attractive." Muriel Spark's readers on bo...
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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
...
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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 cal...
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As a fresh devotee (the zeal of the convert), it seems to me I might perform a service now by telling others about her. I'll do so in two entries. First my general take on the life and work. And th...
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Today is Friday, April 13, the 103rd day of 2007. There are 262 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On April 13, 1970, Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled whe...
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f--- up another dinner party, I said I'd report on a party last weekend, and my continuing effort to socialize myself. Herewith:
I thought I did fine. I didn't seem to make anyone uncomfortable. I...
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Makor the other night, and about the four authors who read from their contributions to the book Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales From Interfaith Homes.
Laurel Snyder ran the show. The book is her brainch...
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Monica Ali is not a subscriber to the guest-worker school of fiction, the vaguely held assumption that what was born abroad should stick with and to its own kind. Like the rest of Europe, the pale ...
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Monica Ali is not a subscriber to the guest-worker school of fiction, the vaguely held assumption that what was born abroad should stick with and to its own kind. Like the rest of Europe, the pale ...
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With "The Feminine Mystique," Betty Friedan gave rise to the modern women's movement, striking a chord that continues to ring four decades later.Friedan and Coretta Scott King gained fame as crusad...
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Muriel Sarah Spark
Muriel (Sarah) Spark
Critical Essay by Harold W. Schneider
Katharine Weber On Literary/Religious Identity (and Muriel Spark)
