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Dame Muriel Spark, DBE (February 1, 1918 – April 13, 2006) was a leading Scottish novelist.

Contents 1 Life 2 Relationship with her son 3 Literary Works 3.1 Novels 3.2 Other Works 4 References 5 External links

She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, to a Jewish father and an Anglican mother, and was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls. In 1934-1935 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.

In 1937, she married Sidney Oswald Spark, followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and had a son with him, but their marriage was a disaster. She returned to the United Kingdom in 1944 and worked in intelligence during World War II.

She began writing seriously after the war, under her married name, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947, she became editor of the Poetry Review. In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic ... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do."^[1] In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing: "I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know - but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…" Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision.

Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957, but it was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) which established her reputation^{[citation needed]}. Spark's originality of subject and tone became apparent at the outset of her career: The Comforters (described by Sir Frank Kermode as "a book of extraordinary originality"^{[citation needed]}) featured a character who knew she was in a novel, and in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie she told her characters' stories from the past and the future simultaneously. Kermode refers to the recurrent theme in her novels of "the central question, why evil exists in a world made by a good God"^{[citation needed]}.

After living in New York City for some years, she moved to Rome where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine in 1968. In the early 1970s they settled in the Italian region of Tuscany and lived in the village of Civitella della Chiana, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumours of lesbian relationships [1] from her time in New York onwards, although Spark and her friends denied their truth.

She received the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the British Literature Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature.

It was reported in the Daily Mail on April 22, 2006 that her only son Robin, 68, had not attended her funeral service in Tuscany. Spark left him in Rhodesia at the age of six while she moved to England and, while she maintained it was her intention for them to set up home in England, he actually returned to Britain with his father 18 months later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland. Thus began a hostile relationship with his mother.

She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. His father was Sydney Spark, whom Muriel had followed to Rhodesia days after their marriage on 3 September 1937. However, within months she realised he was a manic depressive prone to violent outbursts. Robin was born in July 1938 but by 1940 Muriel had separated from Sydney and in 1944 she returned to Britain. Over the years her son is reported to have written, desperate for attention which Spark was unwilling to provide, finding his childish sentiment cloying^{[citation needed]}. The two really fell out in later years when Robin's Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognised as Jewish. The devout Catholic Spark reacted furiously and and accused him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.[2] During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an enquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'.^{[citation needed]}.

1. ^ Hal Hager, "About Muriel Spark," Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999) 141.

• Jewish Chronicle, March 13 1998, page 1, "Discovered: a lost chapter in L'chaim of Miss Jean Brodie"

• Author Muriel Spark dies aged 88, BBC News , April 15, 2006, accompanied by an obituary
• Dame Muriel Spark, 1918-2006: The novelist of identity, a May 1, 2006, Weekly Standard article
• Spark of Genius, a consideration of the author's work in the Winter 2006 Doublethink magazine
• Biography - British Arts Council website, Contemporary writers section
• National Library of Scotland Biography
• James Gillespies High School Official Site
• About "The Black Madonna" Interpretations of and more background information on the short story.