Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark PDF Author: Martin Stannard
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 0297857789
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday). Muriel Spark ended was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hers is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters, and with Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Bachelors rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie PDF Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453245030
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
“A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae PDF Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811219235
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Muriel Spark's bracingly salty memoir is a no-holds-barred trip through an extraordinary writer's life.

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley PDF Author: Allene Stuart Phy
Publisher: Millefleurs
ISBN: 9780930261603
Category : Women and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description


Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley PDF Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Carcanet Press
ISBN: 9781847772374
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This biography recounts the life and loves of the creator of Frankenstein, from her youth as the daughter of a philosopher and a pioneering feminist, through her passionate, turbulent marriage, and her career as a writer and editor.

Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark

Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark PDF Author: Michael Gardiner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748637702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This Companion brings together an international 'Brodie set' of critics to trace the history, impact, reception and major themes of Spark's work, from her early poetry to her last novel. It encompasses the range of Spark's output, pursuing contextual lines of approach including biography, geography, gender, identity, nation and religion, and considering her legacy and continuing influence in the twenty-first century. Spark emerges here as a serious thinker on issues as diverse as the Welfare State, secularisation, decolonisation, and anti-psychiatry, and a writer whose work may be placed alongside Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and Lessing. The critics collected here are mindful of how, although overwhelmingly known as a novelist, by the time of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, Spark already had a significant profile through poetry, biographical criticism, and literary journalism, as chair of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review, and as author or co-author of a number of scholarly studies of writers including Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Cardinal Newman, and John Masefield. Within a relatively modest space this Companion touches on the whole range of Spark's work and, in introducing the oeuvre thematically for those looking to explore this elegant and challenging author further, also sets the agenda for future Spark studies.

The Comforters

The Comforters PDF Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811222411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic)

The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic) PDF Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221040
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

Appointment in Arezzo

Appointment in Arezzo PDF Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857909398
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh's premiere novelists. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel's birth in 2018.

Muriel Spark: The Biography

Muriel Spark: The Biography PDF Author: Martin Stannard
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393051749
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 654

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Book Description
In 1992 the Spark invited Martin Stannard to write her biography, offering interviews and full access to her papers. The result is this biography of the Scottish author.

The Finishing School

The Finishing School PDF Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 030742202X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From Muriel Spark, the grande dame of literary satire, comes this swift, deliciously witty tale of writerly ambition that recalls her beloved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.College Sunrise is a somewhat louche and vaguely disreputable finishing school located, for now, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into Rowland’s creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a red-haired literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots, has already excited the interest of publishers. The inevitable result: keen envy, and a game of cat and mouse fraught with jealousy and attraction, both literary and sexual.