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Curriculum Vitae

Muriel Spark

Foreword by Elaine Feinstein

Muriel Spark  - Curriculum Vitae
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Categories: 20th Century, Christianity, Memoirs, Scottish, Women
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2014)
9781784100919
£10.39 £9.35
Paperback (240 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2009)
9781847771025
£12.99 £11.69
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • ‘Who are you, darling?’ he said.

          I thought it a very good question, and still do. I resolved, all those years ago, to write an autobiography which would help to explain, to myself and others: Who am I. 
    Reissued ahead of the Muriel Spark Centenary in 2018.

    Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. ‘In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,’ Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the ‘girls of slender means’, editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

    Photograph of Muriel Spark: Copyright Jerry Bauer. Cover design StephenRaw.com
    Preface by Elaine Feinstein
    Introduction

    Chapter One
    Chapter Two
    Chapter Three
    Chapter Four
    Chapter Five
    Chapter Six
    Chapter Seven

    Index
    Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, The Fanfarlo, in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include Memento ... read more
    Like all her work, surprising, beautifully written, and with unnerving glimpses into the abyss which lies, always, beneath our feet.
    - John Mortimer, Evening Standard
    'The marvellous thing about Muriel Spark's writing is that...it never gets knotted up in its own so-sharp-she'll-cut-herself cleverness. Spark's writing has a subtle merriment about it, a lightness of touch, a willingness to share in fleeting moments of mundane love and pleasure.'
    Jenny Turner, London Review of Books
    Praise for Muriel Spark 'Mysterious, haunting, meticulously wrought.'
    Stand Magazine


    'Spark achieves precisely what she sets out to: no surprise to us now but pretty impressive given that this was her first book.'
    Zoë Strachan, Scottish Review of Books
    'The style is bracingly familiar – beady, ironic, acidulous... She is an astute critic.'
    Anthony Quinn, Daily Mail
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