International Research Journal of Education and Technology

Centenaries are ideal biographical occasions, and Muriel Spark was good at biographies and centenaries. She loved to celebrate the lives of those writers she admired most. She won a poetry competition for Sir Walter Scott’s centenary in 1932; published A Tribute to Wordsworth for his centenary in 1950; wrote a centennial biography of Mary Shelley, who had died on Spark’s birthday, 1st February 1851; and praised Robert Burns to the heavens on the occasion of his bicentenary in 1996. As a poet and poetry editor in the late 1940s Spark was always on the lookout for literary landmarks. According to her biographer, Martin Stannard, ‘she had a practical eye on the market. Tribute (to Wordsworth) and Child of Light (the Mary Shelley biography) had both been produced to coincide with their subject’s centenaries’.

In her study of Wordsworth, Spark begins the blurring of boundaries between life and literature that would become her trademark: ‘More than is the case with most poets, Wordsworth the man and the poet are interdependent, and Wordsworthian criticism during the twentieth century has been marked by a narrowing of the distinction between the functions of biographer and literary critic’. This blurring of boundaries between biography and fiction goes to the heart of Spark’s writing. She was a biographer-turned-novelist. And in speaking of her biographical subject, Spark lays out an artistic theory of life and literature: ‘Mary Shelley was reticent about her own work, and disliked talking about it. Allusions to her novels in her letters and journals are few, brief and factual. The aim of the article is to explore the life of Muriel Spark through her biographical studies as clues to her own life and art.

Keywords: -

Muriel Spark, biographical, fiction, literature, life, novelist, criticism, biography etc.