Curriculum Vitae

A Volume of Autobiography

Spark Muriel

Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. "In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live", Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the "girls of slender means", editing "Poetry Review" and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

About the Author

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, "The Fanfarlo", in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include "Memento Mori" (1959), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1961), "The Girls of Slender Means" (1963), "The Abbess of Crewe" (1974), "A Far Cry from Kensington" (1988) and "The Finishing School" (2004). Her short stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her "Collected Poems" appeared in 1967. Dame Muriel was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 1996 and awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in Italy on 13th April 2006, at the age of 88.

Reviews

"Cast in the dye of Edinburgh's caustic morality, Ms Spark emerges as one of her own best characters" – Clare Boylan, Irish Times

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