Muriel Spark's Early Fiction

James Bailey is Honorary Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-editor, with Emma Young, of British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) as well as author of articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing and European Journal of English Studies.

Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction is a magnificent achievement, bursting with revealing and original insights into Spark’s fiction and the enduring preoccupations and working methods of this most singular author. The result is a welcome addition to the process Spark scholars have embarked upon in recent years: extricating (or ‘desegregating’) the author from the various literary-critical categories that once confined her. Bailey’s approach is flexible and multi-faceted by contrast, and draws on an impressively extensive use of previously unexamined archival material. The reader is provided with illuminating explorations of ‘instances of narrative daring’ during the first two decades of Spark’s career which range from under-examined early short stories to key texts such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Driver’s Seat, and place the emphasis on her enduring commitment to highlight the ways women become inscribed in oppressive cultural narratives. It is a rich and readable monograph which lives up to its ambition to establish a more complex and appropriate framework to discuss Spark in our current critical era, and will therefore be essential reading for those embarking on future studies of one of the most brilliant and unusual writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Desegregation of Spark1. ‘Author’s Ghosts’: Manifestations of the Supernatural in Spark’s Early Fiction2. ‘The role in which you’ve cast me’: Reassessing the Myth of Spark3. ‘Drama[s] of exact observation’: Spark and the Nouveau Roman4. ‘A study, in a way, of self-destruction’: The Driver’s Seat and the Impotent GazeConclusion: Leaving the HothouseNotesBibliographyIndex