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 Learning Journeys
Muriel Spark
1918 -
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Biography
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Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Jewish Lithuanian
father and an English Protestant mother. She was educated at the Edinburgh James
Gillespie's School for Girls - an experience which undoubtedly inspired the representation
of Edinburgh public school life in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was
a talented student and at age 12 received the Walter Scott prize for a poem entitled
'Out of a Book'. After leaving school, Spark took a course in précis writing
at the Heriott Watt College in Edinburgh. She later taught English as a means
to finance secretarial training.
In 1937 Muriel Camberg married Sydney Oswald Spark and they had a son, Samuel.
For several years of her marriage Spark lived in Central Africa, but her short
fiction dealing with the subject of middle-class marriage and of expatriate life
on the continent suggest a claustrophobic existence. Spark's marriage later ended
in divorce
During the Second World War, Spark was conscripted to the Political Intelligence
Department of the British Foreign Office where she worked as a propagandist for
the war effort. After the war she lived in London, where she began her literary
career. She edited The Poetry Review 1947 -9 and wrote studies of Mary
Shelley, John Masefield and the Bronte sisters. In 1952 she published her first
book, a collection of poetry entitled The Fanfarlo and Other Verse but
it was her winning of the Observer prize for short fiction that finally inspired
her to write fiction full-time. Her first published novel, The Comforters
(1957), was written three years after Spark converted to Roman Catholicism and
the novel was inspired by her studies on the Book of Job. Several critics agree
that her religious conversion was the central event of her life. Francis Hart
has written that 'it in some ways occasioned her appearance as a novelist'. Indeed,
much of Spark's own life can be seen to inform her fiction. The Mandelbaum
Gate (1965) for which she won the James Tait Memorial Prize, has a half-Jewish
heroine, Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) converts
to Catholicism and The Hothouse By The East River (1973) deals with war-time
propaganda.
With the success of her early novels and in particular The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie Spark was able to leave London and in 1967 took up residence in Italy
where she now resides, moving between Rome and New York. After a long period of
relative silence, Spark's most recent novel Aiding and Abetting was published
by Penguin in 2001.
Over her long career Muriel Spark has received countless literary tributes and
honours. In 1971 she was awarded an honorary degree in literature from Strathclyde
University and has been similarly honoured by the Universities of Aberdeen, St
Andrews, Edinburgh and Oxford. Heriot Watt, where she attended as a student, has
also attributed her as a Doctor of the University. In 1993 Spark was made a Dame
of the British Empire and in 1997 she received the David Cohen British Literature
Prize for Lifetime Achievement. |
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