Most girls are happily carefree and perfectly unengaged in the political developments of the time, even though the life-altering moments in history are mentioned in short sub-clauses every now and then: the capture of Ribbentrop, the dropping of the atomic bomb, Churchill’s speeches, Labour’s election success, the ruinous state of London. It concerns the lives of a charming set of young and not so young ladies living together in a building in London which has survived the bombing, but which is haunted by the myth of a bomb dropped there without exploding, some years ago. “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”Īfter a glorious first sentence like that, how could Mrs Spark fail to deliver her usual sparkling cocktail of absurd every-day business, chaotic lifestyles and abrupt drama? Her story is set in the direct aftermath of the Second World War, allowing for exceptions.
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film. Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. These included a Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995 a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris causa) from the American University of Paris in 2005 and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde. Spark received eight honorary doctorates in her lifetime. In 2010, Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century.
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