Muriel Spark: The Biography

Apart from her 1992 memoir, CURRICULUM VITAE, Muriel Spark has remained stoically reticent about her long life. Now in her eighties she shuns interviews. But after admiring Stannard’s two volume life of Evelyn Waugh she agreed that he should be her official biographer. With access to all her papers to back up extensive interviews with Spark and her friends, Stannard has pieced together an absorbing story of the poor little rich girl from Edinburgh, who married at 20 to escape her family, had a son within a year and was divorced soon after. In the latter 1940s she lived with the poet Derek Standford who encouraged her own verse writing and also several lives of writers including Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley and John Masefield. Her first fiction came as she celebrated her 40th birthday; the novel that made her name and reputation, MEMENTO MORI, was adapted for the stage and later for TV – the first of many. But if she is to be remembered for one book it is THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, the story of a Scots schoolteacher. Spark has been a prolific writer since, THE MANDELBAUM GATE winning the James Tait Black Prize, THE ABBESS OF CREWE being filmed. Muriel Spark has been honoured in Britain (OBE in 1967, DBE in 1993) and in France (Commander de l’ Ordre des Arts et des lettres France). For the past thirty years she has lived in Rome.