Spark, Muriel 1918–

(Evelyn Cavallo, Muriel Sarah Spark)

PERSONAL: Born February 1, 1918, in Edinburgh, Scotland; daughter of Bernard and Sarah Elizabeth Maud (Uezzell) Camberg; married Sydney O. Spark, 1937 (divorced); children: Robin (son). Education: Attended James Gillespie's High School for Girls, Edinburgh, 1923–35; Heriot Watt College, 1935–37. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, travel.

ADDRESSES: Home—Italy. Agent—c/o Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022; c/o David Higham Associates Ltd., 5-8 Lower John Street, Golden Square, London W1F 9HA, England.

CAREER: Writer. Employed in the Political Intelligence Department of the British government's Foreign Office, 1944–45; editorial assistant, Argentor (jewelry trade art magazine), 1946–47; general secretary, Poetry Society, 1947–49; editor of Poetry Review, 1947–49; editorial assistant, European Affairs, 1949–50; founder, Forum (literary magazine); part-time editor, Peter Owen Ltd. (publishing company).

MEMBER: PEN (honorary member), American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary member), Society of Authors, Authors Guild, Royal Society of Edinburgh (honorary fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: Observer short story prize, 1951, for "The Seraph and the Zambesi"; Prix Italia, 1962, for radio play adaptation of The Ballad of Peckham Rye; Yorkshire Post Book of the Year award, 1965, and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1966, both for The Mandelbaum Gate; Order of the British Empire, 1967; Scottish Book of the Year award, 1987, for The Stories of Muriel Spark; First Prize, F.N.A.C. La Meilleur Recueil des Nouvelles Etrangeres, 1987, for the Editions Fayard translation of The Stories of Muriel Spark; Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1988, Commandeur, 1996; Bram Stoker Award, 1988, for Mary Shelley; Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, 1992; Dame, Order of the British Empire, 1993; David Cohen British Literature Prize, 1997; PEN International Gold Pen Award, 1998; Campion Award, Catholic Book Club, 2001.Honorary degrees, University of Strathclyde, 1971, University of Edinburgh, 1989, University of Aberdeen, 1995, Watt University, 1995, University of St. Andrews, 1998, and Oxford University, 1999.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Comforters (also see below), Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1957.

Robinson, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1958.

The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (short stories), Macmillan (London, England), 1958, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1960.

Memento Mori (also see below), Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1959.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye (also see below), Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1960.

The Bachelors, Macmillan (London, England), 1960, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1961.

Voices at Play (short stories and radio plays), Macmillan (London, England), 1961, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1962.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (also see below), Macmillan (London, England), 1961, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1962.

A Muriel Spark Trio (contains The Comforters, Memento Mori, and The Ballad of Peckham Rye), Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1962.

The Girls of Slender Means (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1963.

The Mandelbaum Gate, Knopf (New York, NY), 1965.

Collected Stories 1, Macmillan (London, England), 1967, Knopf (New York, NY), 1968.

The Public Image, Knopf (New York, NY), 1968.

The Very Fine Clock (juvenile), Knopf (New York, NY), 1968.

The Driver's Seat, Knopf (New York, NY), 1970.

Not to Disturb, Macmillan (London, England), 1971, Viking (New York, NY), 1972.

The Hothouse by the East River, Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

The Abbess of Crewe (also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

The Takeover, Viking (New York, NY), 1976.

Territorial Rights, Coward (New York, NY), 1979.

Loitering with Intent, Coward (New York, NY), 1981.

Bang-Bang You're Dead and Other Stories, Granada (New York, NY), 1982.

The Only Problem, Coward (New York, NY), 1984, Franklin Library (Franklin Center, PA), 1984.

The Stories of Muriel Spark, Dutton (New York, NY), 1985.

A Far Cry from Kensington, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1988.

Symposium, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1990.

The Novels of Muriel Spark (selections), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1995.

Reality and Dreams, Constable (London, England), 1996.

Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories, New Directions (New York, NY), 1997.

Aiding and Abetting (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 2000.

A Hundred and Eleven Years without a Chauffeur (limited edition of 26 copies; story previously appeared in the New Yorker), Colophon Press (London, England), 2001.

The Complete Short Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

All the Stories of Muriel Spark, New Directions (New York, NY), 2001.

The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark, New Directions (New York, NY), 2003.

Also author of The Small Telephone (juvenile), 1993.

POETRY

The Fanfarlo and Other Verse, Hand and Flower Press (Kent, England), 1952.

Collected Poems 1, Macmillan (London, England), 1967, Knopf (New York, NY), 1968,

Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems, Granada (New York, NY), 1982.

NONFICTION

Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,Tower Bridge Publications, 1951, revised edition published as Mary Shelley, Dutton (New York, NY), 1987.

Emily Bronte: Her Life and Work, P. Owen (London, England), 1953.

John Masefield, Nevill (London, England), 1953, revised edition, Hutchinson (London, England), 1992.

The Essence of the Brontes, P. Owen (London, England), 1993.

EDITOR

(And author of introduction) A Selection of Poems by Emily Bronte, Grey Walls Press (London, England), 1952.

The Letters of Mary Shelley, Wingate (London, England), 1953.

The Letters of the Brontes: A Selection, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1954, published as The Bronte Letters, Nevill (London, England), 1954.

(Coeditor) Letters of John Henry Newman, P. Owen (London, England), 1957.

OTHER

Doctors of Philosophy (play; produced in London, 1962), Macmillan (London, England), 1963, Knopf (New York, NY), 1966.

Curriculum Vitae: An Autobiography, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1993.

Also author of radio plays The Party through the Wall, 1957, The Interview, 1958, The Dry River Bed, 1959, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960, and The Danger Zone, 1961. Contributor of short stories and poems to the New Yorker, and of poems, articles, and reviews to magazines and newspapers. Some writings appear under the pseudonym Evelyn Cavallo.

ADAPTATIONS: Several of Muriel Spark's novels have been adapted for the stage, film, and television. A dramatization of Memento Mori was produced on stage in 1964 and a version was televised by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1992. Jay Presson Allen's dramatization of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published by Samuel French in 1969, was first produced in Torquay, England, at the Princess Theatre beginning April 5, 1966, then in Boston at the Colonial Theatre from December 26, 1967, to January 6, 1968, and finally on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre beginning January 9, 1968. Allen also wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film version of the same novel, a Twentieth Century-Fox production starring Maggie Smith. John Wood's dramatization of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was produced in London at Wyndham's Theatre in 1967, and on Broadway in 1968; a six-part adaptation of the novel appeared on public television in England in 1978 and in the United States in 1979. The Driver's Seat was filmed in 1972, and in 1974 The Girls of Slender Means was adapted for BBC television. The Abbess of Crewe was filmed and released in 1976 under the title Nasty Habits.

SIDELIGHTS: In a career spanning more than half a century, Scottish writer Muriel Spark has enlightened and entertained with her poetry, critical works, biographies, and editorial contributions, but most of all with her score of novels. These include such popular works as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Territorial Rights, Loitering with Intent, The Abbess of Crewe, Symposium, Reality and Dreams, and Aiding and Abetting, many of which have been adapted for radio, the stage, television, or film. Often described as one of the best, yet one of the least appreciated, of today's novelists, Spark confounds those readers and critics who have an affinity for labels and categories. In granting her the 2001 Campion Award, the Catholic Book Club—as quoted on the author's Web site—praised Spark's singular achievement: "Themes universal to the human condition—good and evil, honor and duplicity, self-aggrandizement and self-pity and courage amid poverty—are incarnate in her writing with a sometime eerily familiar face. For good or bad, hers are characters that endure in our memory."

Spark had already achieved some recognition as a critic and poet when she entered what was virtually her first attempt at fiction, the short story "The Seraph and the Zambesi," in a 1951 Christmas writing contest sponsored by the London Observer. The fanciful tale of a troublesome angel who bursts in on an acting troupe staging a holiday pageant on the banks of Africa's Zambesi River, "The Seraph and the Zambesi" won top honors in the competition and attracted a great deal of attention for its unconventional treatment of the Christmas theme. Several other stories set in Africa and England followed; soon Spark's successes in fiction began to overshadow those in criticism and poetry.

With financial and moral support from author Graham Greene, Spark struggled for nearly three years to sort out the aesthetic, psychological, and religious questions raised by her conversion to Catholicism and her attempt at writing longer fiction. Drawing on the tenets of her new faith, which she believes is especially "conducive to individuality, to finding one's own individual point of view," the young writer formulated her own theory of the novel. According to Frank Kermode in his book Continuities, this theory suggests that "a genuine relation exists between the forms of fiction and the forms of the world, between the novelist's creation and God's." In essence, Spark sees the novelist as very Godlike—omniscient and omnipotent, able to manipulate plot, character, and dialogue at will. Viewed in this light, Kermode and others contended, Spark's first novel, The Comforters, is obviously "an experiment designed to discover whether … the novelist, pushing people and things around and giving 'disjointed happenings a shape,' is in any way like Providence."

Because Spark's Catholicism figures so prominently in The Comforters and subsequent works, it is "much more than an item of biographical interest," in the opinion of Victor Kelleher, who commented in Critical Review: "Spark does not stop short at simply bringing the question of Catholicism into her work; she has chosen to place the traditionally Christian outlook at the very heart of everything she writes…. [Her tales proclaim] the most basic of Christian truths: that all man's blessings emanate from God; that, in the absence of God, man is nothing more than a savage." Catharine Hughes makes a similar assessment of Spark's religious sentiment in an article in the Catholic World. The critic observed: "[Spark satirizes] humanity's foibles and incongruities from a decidedly Catholic orientation. One is conscious that she is a writer working within the framework of some of Christianity's greatest truths; that her perspective, which takes full cognizance of eternal values, is never burdened by a painful attempt to inflict them upon others."

At first glance, however, Spark's novels do not seem to reflect her strong religious and moral preoccupations. In terms of setting, for example, the author usually chooses to locate her modern morality tales in upper-class urban areas of England or Italy. Her "fun-house plots, full of trapdoors, abrupt apparitions, and smartly clicking secret panels," as novelist John Updike described them in a New Yorker article, focus on the often bizarre behavior of people belonging to a small, select group: elderly men and women linked by long-standing personal relationships in Memento Mori; unmarried male and female residents of the same London district in The Bachelors; students and teachers at a Scottish girls' school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; servants on a Swiss estate in Not to Disturb; guests at a pair of neighboring Venetian hotels in Territorial Rights. The "action" in these stories springs from the elaborate ties Spark concocts between the members of each group—ties of blood, marriage, friendship, and other kinds of relationships. Commenting in her study of the author titled Muriel Spark, critic Patricia Stubbs observed that the use of such a technique reflects Spark's fascination with "the way in which the individual varies in different settings, or different company." "By taking this restricted group of protagonists," explained Stubbs, "[Spark] is able to create multiple ironies, arising from their connecting and conflicting destinies: by her selection of such a restricted canvas, she can display the many facets of her creatures' personalities, and the different roles which they, or society, decree they should play."

In the tradition of the intellectual novelist, Spark avoids florid descriptions of the physical world, preferring instead to concentrate on dialogue, on "the play of ideas and experiences upon the mind, and the interplay of minds upon each other," according to Joseph Hynes in his Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. Her characterizations are quick, sharp, and concise, and she teams her technical virtuosity with an elegant, acerbic wit and condescending attitude that most readers find highly entertaining. As Melvin Maddocks declared in Life: "Reading a Muriel Spark novel remains one of the minor pleasures of life. Like a perfect hostess, she caters to our small needs. In the manner available to only the best British novelists, she ordains a civilized atmosphere—two parts what Evelyn Waugh called creamy English charm, one part acid wit. She peoples her scene discriminatingly, showing a taste for interesting but not overpowering guests…. As the evening moves along, she has the good sense to lower the drawing-room lights and introduce a pleasantly chilling bit of tension—even violence—just to save us all, bless her, from the overexquisite sensibilities of the lady novelist."

The 1990 best-seller Symposium demonstrates the qualities to which Maddocks refers. It centers on Margaret Demien, a character whose wealthy mother-in-law dies while Margaret is away at a dinner party. Appearing to all as virtuous at first, Margaret openly expresses a more sinister intent. She is also connected to other mysterious deaths, so that when the guests receive news of the older woman's death, Margaret is a suspect. Peter Parker commented in the Listener, "This is a marvelous premise for a novel, and, as one would expect, Spark makes the most of opportunities for dark comedy. Against Margaret's willful attempt to become an instrument of evil is set an example of casual wickedness that unwittingly leads to mortal sin and provides the novel with a terrific final chapter. The book's epigraphs, taken from Symposia of Lucian and Plato, supply hints both of the book's resolution and of Spark's fictional method." The epigraphs also provide clues about the five couples at the dinner party, who in some ways represent the varieties of love Plato defined. "But the real philosophical dialogue in Symposium is not about love nor is it explicitly argued. Rather, it takes place almost between the lines and concerns the mysteries of evil and suffering, destiny and predestination, guilt and intention," Nina King related in a Washington Post Book World review. A Publishers Weekly reviewer also remarked, "Spark's exquisitely balanced tone proves that the richest comedy is that which explores the darkest themes."

Yet, as Barbara Grizzuti Harrison reminded readers in a New York Times Book Review article, Spark is at heart "a profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas." Spark once explained to Contemporary Authors that the intent behind her "mischief" is to make a lasting impression on her readers: "Satire is far more important, it has a more lasting effect, than a straight portrayal of what is wrong. I think that a lot of the world's problems should be ridiculed, but ridiculed properly rather than, well, wailed over. People go to the theater, for instance, to see a play about some outrage or other, and then they come away feeling that they've done something about it, which they haven't. But if these things are ridiculed, it sticks and the perpetrators stop doing it…. I do believe in satire as a very, very potent art form."

Despite all that has been written about her and her fiction, Spark remains an enigma to most critics. Described as an artist, a serious and accomplished writer, a moralist engaged with the human predicament, wildly entertaining, and a joy to read, Spark has nevertheless, in Stubbs's opinion, "succeeded triumphantly in evading classification." Updike, too, contends that Spark possesses a truly exceptional talent—a talent that without a doubt makes her an unclassifiable "original." In fact, he declared in the New Yorker, Spark "is one of the few writers of the language on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine."

Spark produced Curriculum Vitae: An Autobiography in 1993, at the age of seventy-five, partly to correct critical misunderstandings and inaccuracies about her life, and partly to put together the facts about her life and her fiction. "So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written since I became well known," New Leader contributor Hope Hale Davis quoted the author as saying, "that I felt it time to put the record straight." Curriculum Vitae covers the first thirty-nine years of Spark's life, up to the publication of her debut novel, The Comforters. It tells of her childhood in Edinburgh, daughter of a Jewish father and a Protestant English mother (whose accent mortified her daughter on more than one occasion). Spark also tells of her years at Gillespie's, where she studied under Christina Kay, who later served as the model for the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Unlike the fictional Brodie, however, Spark declares, Kay would never have manipulated her charges in an attempt to seduce a fellow teacher. Curriculum Vitae also covers Spark's time spent caring for her bedridden English grandmother; her unhappy marriage to and seven years in southern Rhodesia with the mentally disturbed Sydney O. Spark, who fathered her son, Robin; her war years in the propaganda wing of the British government; and her emergence as a powerful writer of fiction. "In her own fashion, reticent when she chooses but always free of invention," stated Helen Bevington in the New York Times Book Review, "Muriel Spark succeeds in her mission: she puts the record straight. With nearly half her life yet to consider, she will, I hope, tell us the rest of it."

Spark returned to the novel form in 1997 with Reality and Dreams, and again in 2000 with Aiding and Abetting. The former title features aging Tom Richards, a movie director recovering from a fall from a crane. His life is further set into a whirl by the disappearance of his younger daughter, plain-looking Miranda; this misfortune brings him and his wandering wife, Claire, together with Cora, his daughter by an earlier marriage, to try and find the second daughter, whom none of them has ever really accepted. Miranda turns up on a beach where Tom has earlier fantasized about a young girl, the subject of his last movie. Meanwhile, England is in the midst of economic crisis and redundancy. "The novel's awash with love, lust, disillusion, and banality," according to Dierdre Neilen, writing in World Literature Today. Neilen further commented that Spark's "writing compels the story forward, and the reader laughingly follows." Similarly, Francine Prose, writing in People, found the novel "witty [and] surprising," and advised readers to take this opportunity to sample Spark's voice: "elegant, wise, sympathetic, satiric—at once darkly sinister and brightly chipper." Gerda Oldham, writing in the Antioch Review, also thought Spark's "wit and irony" were the ingredients that make "her protagonist and his extended family tick." Lynda Obst, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, described as "masterful" the plot twist in which Marigold lures her father and mother to look for her. And for Lucy Ferriss, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "the more we chortle at the absurdity of Tom's dreams and the sordidness of his reality, the more we recognize our own absurdity and sordidness, our own reality and dreams."

Aiding and Abetting deals with the actual case of Lord Lucan, a British peer who, while apparently attempting to kill his estranged wife, managed to kill the family nanny instead. When he finally attacked his wife, he botched that job as well, and he went missing. The first murder warrant for a peer was issued, but Lucan has never been found. "The Lucan story seems ready-made for Spark's enchanter's powers," wrote Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. in the Chicago Tribune. Hosmer went on to note that Spark "presents an imaginative reconstruction of Lucan's life after that ghastly night," and that she tells a "terrifying human story that cuts across boundaries of gender, race and class to reveal unsettling truths about who we are and how we can behave."

Spark's novel posits two fictional Lucans who visit a psychotherapist in Paris, eventually forming a dangerous and threatening trio when secrets are revealed about all three. Booklist's Brad Hooper thought that this twenty-first novel "shows no diminishment of [Spark's] still-abiding qualities." According to Hooper, Spark created an "intelligent but, above all, entertaining novel of deception." A contributor for Publishers Weekly also noted Spark's strengths as a writer: "terse, astringent and blessed with a wicked satiric wit." For this same reviewer, the reader becomes "immersed in a puzzling maze" with the three main characters. Thomas Mallon, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, similarly praised Spark's "brilliant, addled novels—deceptive, dark little comedies that eventually veer off into bizarre supernaturalness." Mallon found these powers still at work in Aiding and Abetting: "The typical Spark novel has always been stimulatingly off its rocker, and on the strength of Aiding and Abetting, there's yet no need to start persuading Dame Muriel into hers." Newsweek's Jeff Giles had mixed praise for the novel, calling it a "sly, intriguing—if not entirely nourishing—book," while Time's Paul Gray dubbed it an "engaging game of rat and louse [that] concludes with a bit of poetic justice that is ghastly and richly appropriate." Sandra Cookson, writing in World Literature Today, had unconditional praise for Aiding and Abetting, noting that in it "Spark's prose is more tart, quirky, and spare than ever, her irony more relentless than in earlier novels."

In 2001 a limited edition of twenty-six copies of A Hundred and Eleven Years without a Chauffeur was published by Colophon Press. Each copy is signed and inscribed with a passage and a letter of the alphabet by Spark. The story previously appeared in the New Yorker. Further collections by Spark have appeared in the new millennium. The Complete Short Stories collects forty-one tales, many of them ghost tales, arranged according to theme rather than chronology. For Gabrielle Annan, reviewing the collection in the Spectator, the "neatest, wittiest, shortest, cleverest" of the ghost tales is "The Pearly Shadow," about a hallucination that is passed along like a cold. Religious stories as well as crime stories, ones set in Africa, and ones featuring a plucky female protagonist also find a place in the collection, which, in fact, is a mirror of Spark's artistic proclivities over the full span of her writing life. Reviewing the same collection in the New Statesman, Rebecca Abrams concluded that the "trademark" of all Spark's fiction, both novels and short stories, "is its lightness, the way it seems almost to shrug its shoulders at the people and lives it so piercingly brings to life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 40, 1987, Volume 94, 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, 1983, Volume 139: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–1980, 1994.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1990.

Enright, D. J., Man Is an Onion: Reviews and Essays, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1972.

Hynes, Joseph, editor, Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, G.K. Hall (New York, NY), 1992.

Kemp, Peter, Muriel Spark, Elek, 1974, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1975.

Kermode, Frank, Continuities, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

Malkoff, Karl, Muriel Spark, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1968.

Page, Norman, Muriel Spark, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Pearlman, Mickey, Re-inventing Reality: Patterns and Characteristics in the Novels of Muriel Spark, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1996.

Randisi, Jennifer Lynn, On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark, Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC), 1991.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 10, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Sproxton, Judy, The Women of Muriel Spark, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Sproxton, Judy, Muriel Spark, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Stubbs, Patricia, Muriel Spark, Longman (London, England), 1973.

Whittaker, Ruth, The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark, Macmillan (London, England), 1978.

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, winter, 1998, Gerda Oldham, review of Reality and Dreams, p. 116; spring, 2002, Barbara Beckerman Davis, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 340.

Atlantic Monthly, February, 2001, Thomas Mallon, review of Aiding and Abetting, pp. 124-125.

Booklist, October 1, 2000, Brad Hooper, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 292.

Catholic World, August, 1961, Catharine Hughes.

Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1997, Cassandra West, review of Reality and Dreams, p. 3; March 4, 2001, Robert E. Hosmer, Jr., review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 6; March 14, 2002, Sandy Bauers, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. B8.

Critical Review, number 18, 1976, article by Victor Kelleher.

Entertainment Weekly, March 30, 2001, Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 64.

Library Journal, October 15, 2000, Barbara Love, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 105.

Life, October 11, 1968, article by Melvin Maddocks.

Listener, September 20, 1990, Peter Parker, review of Symposium.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 8, 1997, Lynda Obst, review of Reality and Dreams, p. 10:2.

New Leader, May 17, 1993, Hope Hale Davis, review of Curriculum Vitae, p. 29.

New Statesman, October 1, 2001, Lisa Allardice, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 80; October 15, 2001, Rebecca Abrams, review of The Complete Short Stories, pp. 56-57.

Newsweek, February 26, 2001, Jeff Giles, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 71.

New Yorker, June 8, 1981, John Updike, review of Loitering with Intent, p. 148.

New York Times Book Review, May 31, 1981, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, review of Loitering with Intent, p. 11; May 16, 1993, Helen Bevington, review of Curriculum Vitae: An Autobiography; March 11, 2001, Richard Eder, review of Aiding and Abetting, pp. 14-15.

People, August 25, 1997, Francine Prose, review of Reality and Dreams, p. 41; March 5, 2001, Joanne Kaufman, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 51.

Publishers Weekly, October 26, 1990, review of Symposium; November 20, 2000, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 44.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 6, 1997, Lucy Ferriss, review of Reality and Dreams, p. F5.

Spectator, October 20, 2001, Gabrielle Annan, review of The Complete Short Stories, p. 53.

Time, March 12, 2001, Paul Gray, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 90.

Village Voice, March 20, 2001, Charles McNulty, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 66.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1997, review of Reality and Dreams, p. 130.

Washington Post Book World, November 25, 1990, Nina King, review of Symposium.

World Literature Today, spring, 1997, Deirdre Neilen, review of Reality and Dreams, p. 373; summer, 2001, Sandra Cookson, review of Aiding and Abetting, p. 150.

ONLINE

David Higham Associates, http://www.davidhigham.co.uk/ (November 14, 2003).

Official Muriel Spark Web site, http://murielspark.com/ (November 14, 2003).

Penguin UK Web site, http://www.penguin.co.uk/ (November 14, 2003), Toby Litt, "Interview with Muriel Spark."