Muriel Spark. Dame Muriel Spark, DBE (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006)[1] was an award-winning Scottish novelist.
In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945", at #8.[2] Early life[edit] She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, the daughter of Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell) and Bernard Camberg, an engineer.[3] Her father was Jewish and her mother had been raised a Presbyterian, as was Spark.[4][5] She was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls (1923–1935).[6] The family lived in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. In 1934–35 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College.
She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.[7] On 3 September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Writing career[edit] Relationship with her son[edit] Spark and her son Robin had a strained relationship. Novels[edit] BBC Two - Writing Scotland - Muriel Spark. Walls, In Search of Scotland, University of Otago, New Zealand. John Buchan (1875-1940) Buchan was born in Perth in Scotland, the eldest of six siblings.
At the age of five he sustained a skull fracture in a carriage accident. The resulting scar is still clearly visible in the photograph above. Trained as a barrister, he found more success as a publisher, writer and politician. He himself said ‘Publishing is my business, writing an amusement and politics my duty.’ John Galt (1779-1839) Born in Irvine on the west coast of Scotland, Galt was a sickly child who stayed at home and despite his mother’s protestations, developed ‘bookish propensities’. Memento Mori ~ Muriel Spark - dovegreyreader scribbles.
''If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death.
I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.' This quote from Memento Mori by Muriel Spark reminded me of something quite bizarre and in the true and very subjective tradition of dovegreyreading I have to share it.As a young and clearly very impressionable child I attended an Anglican Sunday School, as many of us did in the 1950s. But I digress, Memento Mori is not about youth, it's about old age and it has to be the most hilarious of Muriel Spark's books that I've read to date in this ongoing Spark Season.
What shall I do with absurdity -O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,Decrepit old age that has been tied to meAs to a dog's tail? Muriel Spark - Home page. Muriel Spark Home. Muriel Spark Archive. Obituary: Dame Muriel Spark. All the great heroines created by Dame Muriel Spark, who has died in Florence aged 88, enunciate with the unmistakable, perfectly pitched voice of She Who Can Do No Wrong, immaculately hatted and gloved, neatly wired into a personal hotline to God.
Nancy ("Mrs") Hawkins, narrator of Spark's most affectionately autobiographical novel, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), is a good example: "I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do. At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line. It is enough for me to discriminate mentally, and leave the rest to God. " No other writer has ever come close to imitating this special narrative voice.
In its waspishness, its spirit, its curiously posh-Scottish camp, it is one of the great creations of postwar British writing. She is survived by her son. Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Dame Muriel Spark, famous people from Edinburgh. Born in Edinburgh, Edinburgh and the LothiansBorn on 1st of February 1918Died on 13rd of April 2006 Born 1918 -Died 2006 Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet.
Lived for a time in Central Africa. Won short story competition in 1951 with The Seraph and the Zambesi. Converted to Roman Catholicism. Achieved public success with sixth novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Links: BBC Bio More famous Britons here Contributors: Do you have a site related to Dame Muriel Spark? 1486 views since 7th February 2007.