Muriel Spark – författare

One of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World'A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women SelectionMuriel Spark's classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features a schoolmistress you'll never forget, in this beautifully repackaged Penguin Essentials edition.'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .'Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of 'special girls' at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the crème de la crème, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex - who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty . . .The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliantly comic novel featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in all literature.'Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards' John Updike'Spark's most celebrated novel' Independent'There is no question about the quality and distinctiveness of her writing, with its quirky concern with human nature, and its comedy' William Boyd'A brilliant psychological figure' ObserverMuriel Spark was born and educated in Edinburgh. She was active in the field of creative writing since 1950, when she won a short-story writing competition in the Observer, and her many subsequent novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and Aiding and Abetting (2000). She also wrote plays, poems, children's books and biographies. She became Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993, and died in 2006.

På en flickskola i mellankrigstidens Edinburgh samlar Miss Jean Brodie en frigjord, passionerad och högst målmedveten lärarinna en skara noggrant handplockade elever: de allra, allra bästa, hennes flickor, Brodies gäng.De mer konventionella skolämnena får ge vika för kärlek, politik och konst, och Miss Jean Brodie gör allt för att forma flickorna till starka och oberoende kvinnor. Samtidigt har hon kärleksaffärer med två av skolans manliga lärare, varav den ena är gift. »Tryggheten är inte det viktigaste«, manar hon sina elever. »Godhet, Sanning och Skönhet är det viktigaste. Följ mig.« Och det gör de. Men en av flickorna ska komma att förråda henne.I översättning av Ingeborg von Rosen och med ett förord av Andres Lokko.MURIEL SPARK [1918 -2006] är en skotsk romanförfattare och poet vars produktiva författarskap tillhör de verkligt säregna och betydande från det brittiska 1900-talets andra hälft. Romanen Miss Jean Brodies bästa år [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961] blev hennes stora genombrott och är fortfarande hennes mest lästa och omtyckta bok.

'It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.'The May of Teck Club 'exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years'. Nevertheless, and though there is a war on, they find the time between elocution lessons to jostle one another over suitors (some more suitable than others) and a single Schiaparelli gown. But can a love of literature, fine clothes and amorous young men save these young ladies from the horrors of the real world?'Unsettling and exhilarating' William Boyd, Daily Telegraph 'An enduring genius' Guardian

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksMuriel Spark claimed The Driver's Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise - heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind - you will understand why.

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''A sublimely funny book ... it is a book to be read by all ... unforgettable and universal' Candia McWilliamRomantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - 'the crème de la crème' - who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a privileged world of adult games that they will never forget. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted into a successful stage play, and later a film directed by Ronald Neame and starring Maggie Smith.

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."

Described as 'a metaphysical shocker' at the time of its release, Muriel Sparks' The Driver's Seat is a taut psychological thriller, published with an introduction by John Lanchester in Penguin Modern Classics.Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress and flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex and new experiences takes on a far darker significance as she heads on a journey of self-destruction. Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in an unnamed southern city, as she meets her fate. One of six novels to be nominated for a 'Lost Man Booker Prize', The Driver's Seat was adapted into a 1974 film, Identikit, starring Elizabeth Taylor.Muriel Spark (1918 - 2006) wrote poetry, stories, and biographies as well as a remarkable series of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) which received the James Tait Black Prize, and The Public Image (1968) and Loitering with Intent (1981), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Spark was awarded the T.S. Eliot Award for poetry in 1992, and the David Cohen Prize for literature in 1997. If you enjoyed The Driver's Seat, you might like Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'An extraordinary tour de force, a crime story turned inside out'David Lodge'Her spiny and treacherous masterpiece'New Yorker

A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham Rye and brings lies, tears, blackmail and even murder into the lives of all he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to Beauty, the resident femme fatale, and even Mr Druce, the unsuspecting Managing Director himself.

Beautifully packaged reissue of one of Muriel Spark's best loved novels, The Girls of Slender Means'Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions'In the May of Teck Club - a London hostel 'three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit' - the young lady residents do their best to act as if the war never happened. They practice elocution, and jostle one another over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. But behind the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations they hide some tragically painful secrets and wounds.'You girls are my vocation . . . I am dedicated to you in my prime''Reading the novel as a young woman was a random gift; rereading it today is to encounter the rarest of fiction and to appreciate the early and enduring genius of Muriel Spark' Carol Shields, Guardian'One of Spark's most evocative novels' Anne TaylorMuriel Spark was born and educated in Edinburgh. She was active in the field of creative writing since 1950, when she won a short-story writing competition in the Observer, and her many subsequent novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and Aiding and Abetting (2000). She also wrote plays, poems, children's books and biographies. She became Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993, and died in 2006.

'One of the greatest books about growing up' James Wood, Guardian'You girls are my vocation . . . I am dedicated to you in my prime'Miss Jean Brodie is a schoolmistress with a difference. She is proud, cultured and romantic but her educational ideas are highly progressive and even deeply shocking. So when she decides to transform a group of 'special girls' into the crème de la crème at Marcia Blaine School they are soon known, perhaps suspiciously, as the Brodie set.Introduced to an unsettling world of adult games and curious intrigues, the Brodie Set know that they are privileged. Yet there is a price to pay - they must give Miss Brodie their undivided loyalty . . .'The most gifted and innovative British novelist of her generation' David Lodge, The New York Times'Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards' John Updike, New Yorker

Remember you must die.Dame Lettie Colston is the first of her circle to receive insinuating anonymous phone calls. Neither she, nor her friends, wish to be reminded of their mortality, and their geriatric feathers are thoroughly ruffled. As the caller's activities become more widespread, old secrets are dusted off, exposing post and present duplicities, self-deception and blackmail. Nobody is above suspicion.Witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

The Observing Eye is a collection of Muriel Spark's brilliant asides, sayings, and aphorisms. No other writer can hold a candle to her wry, puckish observations:'Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people's mentalities.''It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.''The sacrifice of pleasure is of course itself a pleasure.''Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time in your life it may occur.''Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left.'Spark's striking insights are precise and unforgettable - they will make you laugh and nod in agreement, with a wicked smile on your face. Her wise words never fail to hit exactly the right note.

The first of two volumes of the letters of Muriel Spark, one of the greatest and most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.*One of the TLS Books of the Year 2025* In 1944, on her return to England after a disastrous marriage, Muriel Spark was unknown as a writer except to a handful of close friends; by 1963 she was the internationally renowned author of seven critically acclaimed, bestselling novels.Her letters - witty, affectionate, sharp, mercurial - reveal the turbulence of her early career in postwar London: her struggles to earn a living as a writer, her difficult love affairs, a terrifying breakdown, and her conversion to Catholicism. They also trace her development from little-known poet to celebrated novelist, with glittering insights into the emergence of her unique literary voice, as well as her relationships with friends, lovers, writers and publishers.Selected from her extensive correspondence and insightfully edited and annotated, this is an essential read for anyone interested in Spark's work and world.PRAISE FOR VOLUME 1: '[An] immaculately-edited collection . . . Feisty, fun-filled, witty and, of course, sparky, the letters are a window into a remarkable life that was lived in devotion to literature'ALAN TAYLOR, author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark'What an extraordinary life of adventure the young Muriel Spark led. These funny and fraught early letters capture her triumphs and disasters vast and small, not to mention the curious predicaments--personal, artistic, familial--to which she seemed fated. A marvelous book'JOSEPH O'NEILL'Letters is a marvel. Taking in faith, love, fame and feuds, Spark's letters reveal her life to be every bit as compelling as the novels she wrote' JAMES BAILEY, author of Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark'Meticulously edited . . . The letters invited an investigation into both the life and the work' RACHEL CUSK, NEW YORKER'Fascinating . . . edited with exemplary attention to detail by Dan Gunn. There are delightful touches throughout' SPECTATOR'The book I wanted not to end was The Letters of Muriel Spark (Virago), superbly edited by Dan Gunn, spanning 1944 to 1963. She was fun, she was charming, and if you weren't careful - sometimes even if you were - she was vengeful'JAMES CAMPBELL, TLS Books of the Year 2025'Wonderful . . . An eye-opening reflection of her daily life and an important contribution to her literature' SCOTTISH SUNDAY POST'A must-read' STANDARD'Gunn faced a formidable task in distilling into two volumes a body of about 3,500 letters and capturing the nature and force of Spark's personality. . . he has risen to the challenge impressively' CLAIRE HARMAN, LITEARY REVIEW'Spark's selected letters [exhibit] the glorious range of Muriel's intellect, anxieties, love and rage, her sense of frailty as well as of strength. For these are often spectacularly good, funny, painful statements, which Gunn has edited brilliantly' MARTIN STANNARD, THE OLDIEAs Gunn's meticulously edited first volume of Muriel Spark's letters shows, so much happened to her it is no surprise she found material for a lifetime's fiction . . . A spellbinding portrait of the writer as a relatively young woman' ROSEMARY GORING, HERALD

I can't help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can't stop them. It feels like preaching the gospel.When publishing assistant and war widow Nancy Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he 'urinates frightful prose', the repercussions are swift. Losing not one, but two, much-sought-after literary jobs, Mrs Hawkins finds herself embroiled in a mystery involving anonymous letters, quack remedies and blackmail. Years later, and a far cry from Kensington, she looks back with a sharp and mischievous eye at the cost of telling the truth. Introduced by Ali Smith.'Mercurially funny, playful and mischievous' Ali Smith 'I was in heaven reading this book. . . just blissful' Stephen Fry'Funny, astringent, shrewd, her take on life is wonderfully bracing' William Boyd'Wonderfully entertaining' Sunday Telegraph'An outstanding novel . . . A Far Cry From Kensington has an effortless, translucent grasp of the spirit of the period' Observer'The divine Spark is shining at her brightest . . . Pure delight' Claire Tomalin

Spark chooses Rome, "the motherland of sensation," for the setting of her story about movie star Annabel Christopher (known to her adoring fans as "The English Lady-Tiger"), who has made the fatal mistake of believing in her public image. This error and her embittered husband, and unsuccessful actor, catch up with her. Her final act is only the first shocking climax—further surprises await. Neatly savaging our celebrity culture, Spark rejoices in one of her favorite subjects—the clash between sham and genuine identity—and provides Annabel with an unexpected triumph.

“The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon,” said The New York Times, and “never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe.” An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of “amorous green”) has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and—plunged into scandal—the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.

January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as "an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it." In Robinson, Muriel Spark's wonderful second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping-pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, andperhapsmurder. Everything astounds, confounds, and convinces, frighteningly. "She is," as Charles Alva Hoyt once put it, "the Jane Austen of the Surrealists." Robinson, a unique and marvelous novel, is another display of the powers of "the most gifted and innovative British novelist" (The New York Times). In the work of Dame Murielin the last words of Robinson "immediately all things are possible."

I aim to startle as well as please," Muriel Spark has said, and in these eight marvelous ghost stories she manages to do both to the highest degree. As with all matters in the hands of Dame Muriel her spooks are entirely original. A ghost in her pantheon can be plaintive or a bit vengeful, or perhaps may not even be aware of being a ghost at all. One in fact is the ghost of a man who isn't even dead yet. Another takes the bus home from work, believing she is still alive, though she is haunted by an odious tune stuck in her head (which her murderer had been relentlessly humming), and distressed by a "feeling of incompletion." And a reflective ghost recalls her mortal days of enjoying "the glory of the world, as if it would never pass. Spark has a flair for confiding ghosts: "I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one's executors can never do properly." In her case the odd things include cheerily hailing her murderer, "Hallo George!" and driving him mad. The remarkably nonchalant stories here include some of her most wicked and famous"The Seraph and the Zambesi," "The Hanging Judge," and "The Portobello Road"and they all gleam with that special Spark sheen, the quality The Times Literary Supplement has hailed as "gloriously witty and polished."

One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying "the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very momentSymposium was applauded by Time magazine for the "sinister elegance" of Muriel Spark's "medium of light but lethal comedy." Mixed in are a Monet, a mad uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by a rent-a-butler. Symposium stars a perfectly evil young woman (a classic sweet-faced hair-raising Sparkian horror) who has married rich Hilda's son by hook or by crook, hooking him at the fruit counter of Harrod's. There is also spiritual conversationand the Bordeaux is superb. "The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives .No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and subversiveness of thought more elegantly." (The Independent on Sunday).

A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. They lock themselves in the library with specific instructions not to be disturbed for any reason. Soon, shouts and screams emerge from the library; the Baron’s lunatic brother starts madly howling in the attic; two of the secretary’s friends are left waiting in a car; a reverend’s services are needed for an impromptu wedding—and despite all that the servants obey their orders as they pass the time playing records, preparing dinner, and documenting false testimonies while a twisted murder plot unfolds upstairs.

It is no surprise that one of Muriel Spark’s most lively and entertaining works would be her own memoir, Curriculum Vitae. Born to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Presbyterian mother, Spark describes her childhood in 1930s Edinburgh in brief, dazzling anecdotes. In one she recalls a cherished schoolteacher, Christina Kay, who would later be used as the prototype for Miss Jean Brodie. Spark boldly details her disastrous first marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.) — himself thirty-two, she just nineteen — whom she followed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and left behind to return to England. In the midst of WWII, Spark took a bizarre position working in the disinformation campaign of the British Secret Service, eliciting information from German POWs to combat Nazi propaganda. She later moved to the Poetry Society of London, where she mingled with literati and other intellectuals, befriended by some (such as Graham Greene, an early supporter of her work) and sparring with others. We experience Spark’s joy with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, her trials with other writers’ envy, and her emergence as the most brilliant femme fatale of 20th-century English literature.

A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life; love; cats; favorite writers (T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, the Brontës, Mary Shelley); Piero della Francesca; life in wartime London and in glamorous “Hollywood-on-the-Tiber;” 1960s Rome; faith; and parties (on her first New Year’s Eve, as a baby sipping her mother’s sherry: “I always loved a party”).Spark’s scope is amazing, and her striking, glancing insights are precise and unforgettable. From the mysteries of Job’s sufferings, she glides to Dame Edith Sitwell’s cocktail advice about how to handle a nasty publisher, and on to the joys of success.

Layers of intrigue; triangulating love affairs; murders; international spy-craft; adultery; parental interference; the sweet careless rapture of youth; unmarked graves — Territorial Rights claims much ground and Muriel Spark enjoys a wicked dance on it.