Muriel Spark (1918–2006,) fully Dame Muriel Sarah Spark, née Camberg, was a Scottish novelist, short-story writer, poet, biographer, and literary critic. She is best known for the satire and wit with which she depicted the serious themes of her novels.
Born in Edinburgh, Spark was educated there. She spent some years in Rhodesia, which served as the setting for her first volume of short stories, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (1958.) She returned to Great Britain during World War II and worked for the Foreign Office, writing propaganda. After the war, she remained in London, becoming general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of Poetry Review 1947–49. In 1954, she converted to Roman Catholicism, an event that informed some of her best work. From the early 1960s, she lived mostly in New York and Italy.
After The Comforters (1957,) Spark’s reputation grew gradually with the publication of Memento Mori (1959,) The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960,) and The Bachelors (1961.) She achieved public success with her sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961; stage 1966; film 1969,) a cynical portrayal of an emancipated Edinburgh schoolteacher and her favorite pupils.
Spark’s later works include The Girls of Slender Means (1963,) The Mandelbaum Gate (1965,) The Abbess of Crewe (1974,) Loitering with Intent (1981,) The Only Problem (1984,) A Far Cry from Kensington (1988,) Aiding and Abetting (2000,) and The Finishing School (2005.)
Spark’s stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, was published in 1992. She also wrote poems and critical biographies of Mary Shelley (1951,) John Masefield (1953,) and the Brontë sisters (1954.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Muriel Spark
Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Parenting, Parents
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Education
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Smile
One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Psychiatry
Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Aging, Age
I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Enjoyment
One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Potential
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Dying, Death
If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Religion
It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Weather
I wouldn’t take the Pope too seriously. He’s a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.
—Muriel Spark
Topics: Religion
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