Spark, Dame Muriel Sarah

Spark, Dame Muriel Sarah (1918– ), author, of Scottish-Jewish descent, born and educated in Edinburgh. After spending some years in Central Africa, which was to form the setting for several of her short stories, including the title story of The Go-Away Bird (1958), she returned to Britain where she worked for the Foreign Office during the Second World War. She began her literary career as editor and biographer, working for the Poetry Society and editing its Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949; the problems of biography and autobiography form the subject of Loitering with Intent (1981). Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), was followed by many others, including Memento Mori (1959), a comic and macabre study of old age; The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), a bizarre tale of the underworld, mixing shrewd social observation with hints of necromancy; perhaps her best-known work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); The Girls of Slender Means (1963); The Mandelbaum Gate (1965); The Public Image (1968); The Driver's Seat (1970), about a woman possessed by a death-wish; The Abbess of Crewe (1974); and The Take Over (1976), set in Italy, where she settled. Her novels are elegant and sophisticated, with touches of the bizarre and the perverse; many have a quality of fable or parable, and her use of narrative omniscience is highly distinctive. Her Collected Poems and Collected Plays were both published in 1967, and Complete Short Stories in 2001. Later novels include A Far cry From Kensington (1988) Symposium (1990), and Aiding and Abetting (2000) about Lord Lucan. A volume of autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, appeared in 1992.