Spark, Muriel

(1918-2006)

   Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh to a Jewish Lithuanian father and an English Protestant mother, she was educated at the Edinburgh James Gillespie's School for Girls. It was possibly this experience that inspired her novel (later a film) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962). During the war she worked for the propaganda department of the British Foreign Office and after the war she edited The Poetry Review, wrote studies of several famous authors and published The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952). Her winning of the Observer Prize for short fiction inspired her to write fiction full-time, and between The Comforters (1957) and The Finishing School (2004) she wrote altogether 22 novels. Converting to Roman Catholicism in 1954 was a major transition in her life. She spent much of her life in Italy, where she died. She has received honors from six universities, received the David Cohen British Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and was made a Dame of the British Empire and in 1997. Some of her poems: "Against the Transcendentalists," "Canaan," "Elegy in a Kensington Churchyard," "Faith and Works," "Kensington Gardens," "The She Wolf."

   Sources: All the Poems of Muriel Spark. W.W. Norton and Co. Ltd., 2004. All the Poems: Collected Poems of Muriel Spark. Carcanet Press, 2004. Biography of Muriel Spark (http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/muriel_spark/). Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. Obituary of Muriel Spark, BBC News, 15th April 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ entertainment/3659703.stm). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New Yorker Book of Poems. The New Yorker editors. Viking Press, 1969. The Oxford Book of Garden Verse. John Dixon Hunt, ed. Oxford University Press, 1993. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Who's Who. London: A & C Black, 2005. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).