Muriel Spark – a representative of the critical realism in the newest English litera­ture.

Muriel Spark is the Scottish born writer. She was born in Edin­burgh and educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls, then at Heriot-Watt College. She is a long-time resident in Rome, Italy. Shebecame a Catholic in 1954 and many of her satirical commentaries on modern life are coloured by her Roman Catholic faith. Muriel Spark travelled to South Africa, spent several years in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and married there Sydney Oswald Spark, a school teacher, in 1938. The marriage was dissolved and she returned to England in 1944 and worked in the Foreign Office as an anti-war and anti-Nazi propagandist.

Her first interest was in poetry when she created her poem Out of a Book for which she was awarded the Sir Walter Scott prize.

Spark's professional literary activity began in 1950s with the works about Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and Wil­liam Wordsworth.

Her first collection of stories came out in 1958 under the title The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories. She is a good psychologist and shows the atmosphere of hypocrisy, snobbism and greediness of pet­ty bourgeoisie. In 1954 Muriel began her work on the novel, The Comforters, which was published in 1957 and is concerned with a neurotic woman writer, Caroline Rose, having to come to terms with her new-found Catholicism.

She then made an impact with the novel, Robinson (1958), which, curiously enough, like Golding's Lord of the Flies, owes something to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. January Marlow and two other survi­vors of a plane crash spend three months on an island inhabited only by Robinson and his servant. Robinson, a semi-mythical figure – benefactor, host and provider, yet also governor and director – withdraws for a space to contrive temporary freedom for the survi­vors, and their relationships reenact passages from January's past. In Memento Mori (1959) aged characters have the tenor of their ways shaken by intermittent telephone calls reminding them that they must die. Thus Muriel Spark subjects her characters to special­ized laboratory conditions that intensify aspects of the inescapable human condition - they are marooned in exile or under threat of mortality. Her narrative is wry, blunt, and provocatively funny.

Her little worlds become microcosms of the larger reality. Dimen­sions of awareness are lightly opened up. The Devil turns up, at a London factory, in the shape of a lively Scotsman in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). The Bachelors (I960) is a quieter study of what the title suggests: the intrusion of the unknown. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) is the study of an Edinburgh eccentric school teacher (admired, but later disenchanted by her pupil), whose meth­ods challenge authority and subject her favourite pupils to over-pressurized hot-house development, socially and sexually. The book carries several of the Spark trademarks: a taut, nervy, controlled style; precise characterization; a deadly accurate wit which enter­tains and appalls at the same time. There is autobiographical materi­al here as in the much later novel, Loitering with Intent (1981).

Her other novels include The Public Image, reflecting the movie world in a classical setting (1968), The Driver's Seat, billed as "an ethical shocker" (1970), Not to Disturb, set on the banks of Lake Geneva (1971), The Hothouse by the East River in which most of the characters are already dead being killed during World War II when their train was bombed (1973), The Abbess of Crewe which is a send-up of the Nixon Watergate scandal (1974), Territorial Rights (1979), The Only Problem (1984). Spark's shorter fiction has been collected in The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985), and she has also written poetry and literary criticism. The historical subject is dominating in her book Aiding and Abetting (2002). Muriel Spark is retelling the story of Lord Lucan who went missing suspected of the murder of his children's nanny.

Muriel Spark is a witty writer with an epigrammatic crispness in dialogue. Technically she engineers time shifts and modes of presentation with adroitness. She is the distinguished woman of letters, whose scores of books over more than half a century have consistently delighted and satisfied readers across several conti­nents. Whether in poetry, short story, or novel, Muriel Spark's writing is taut, crisp, concise, and always filled with wit.

The human conditions she explores may have dimensional open­ness to the possibility of the extra-naturalistic, but she steers well clear of mechanical allegory or over-contrived symbolism. Her im­aginative worlds exist in their own right. She is considered to be a representative of the critical realism in the newest English litera­ture. Spark won popularity as a novelettist or short-story writer. But the basis of her views is rather contradictory. On the one hand she tried to show the absurdity of human life and its fatalism. On the other hand she represents herself as a writer, who knows the morality, psychology of the "middle class"; she reflects the atmos­phere of hypocrisy and snobbism of bourgeois society. She writes about the absence of moral values and spiritual emptiness and cyn­icism of the contemporary people. Her literary world is peopled by ordinary, familiar characters and frequently features powerful and iron-willed women.

Spark was appointed OBE (Officer of British Empire) in 1967 and has been awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Strathclyde (1971) and the University of Edin­burgh (1989).

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