Author Muriel Spark, creator of the satirical character Miss Jean Brodie, died in Italy on Friday at the age of 88. The writer, whose acerbic sense of humor attracted admirers and critics alike, was made the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993. Spark's death was announced by Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor of the village of Civitella della Chiana, which had been Spark's home for the last three decades.
Among Spark's best works was
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, the story of a modern-minded schoolteacher in a conservative all-girl school in Edinburgh in the 1930s. The book was made into a play, which in turn was adapted into a film in 1969. The film, directed by Ronald Neame, won actress Maggie Smith, who played Miss Brodie, an Academy Award for Best Actress.
One of the most popular British writers of postwar literature, Spark was recognized for the sinister humor of her writing. While some lauded her ability to take potshots at the ironies of life, many accused her of being detached from her characters and treating them cruelly.
However, most of her works were based on her experiences, from her longing to return from Rhodesia to Britain after World War II, to her bad marriage, to her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954.
She explained her detachment with her characters with, “Maybe it is icy. I have a cold attitude to my characters. And I don't prepare readers for something terrible. I prefer shock treatment.”
Born on February 1, 1918, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a Jewish father and an Anglican mother, Muriel Sarah Camberg studied at James Gillespie's High School for Girls, where she received unorthodox education from Christina Kay, a teacher on whom Miss Brodie's character was based. In 1938, the author tied the knot with Sydney Oswald Spark, a teacher who was 13 years elder to her.
Spark would later describe the six-year marriage as a disaster. “It was a big disaster. He became a borderline case, and I didn't like what I found on either side of the border,” she wrote in her autobiography.
The couple moved to Southern Rhodesia, and Spark had a son, Robin, there. However, her relationship with her husband continued deteriorating and in 1944, the author, who retained her married name even after the divorce, came back to London. In the beginning of her career, Spark wrote reviews and criticisms, and in 1947, took up the post of the editor of the
Poetry Review. While struggling in her initial writing years, she lived at the Helena Club, on which she later based the May of Teck Club in her novel
The Girls of Slender Means.
By 1954, Spark decided to become a Roman Catholic, a decision she said shaped her literary skills in some abstract way. “Catholicism is the only religion I view as rational. It helps you get rid of all the other problems in your life,” she had once said. After her conversion, her first novel,
The Comforters, was published in 1957. The novel was the result of a newly found religion and drug-induced hallucinations, as Spark resorted to Dexedrine to keep her hunger in check.
Even after she gave up amphetamines, her health remained frail till she found an angel in Graham Greene, who helped her sustain. Things, however, changed in 1961 when
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie came about. The book won her critical acclaim and paved the way for her other creations, including
The Girls of Slender Means in 1963 and
The Mandelbaum Gate in 1965.
Among some honors bestowed on Spark were fellowship of The Royal Society of Literature in 1963, an honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, the David Cohen Literature Prize for lifetime achievement in 1997 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Spark has to her credit, bestsellers like
Memento Mori,
The Ballad of Peckham Rye,
Loitering with Intent,
The Driver's Seat,
Not To Disturb, and
A Far Cry from Kensington.
