Martin Stannard’s long awaited biography of Muriel Spark is due out April 12th. In it, Stannard asserts that Dame Muriel’s infamous “ruthlessness” is what she as a woman artist a male-dominated world needed to have to succeed. Spark was “a survivor, a phoenixâ€, and resolutely shook off the clinging hands of “lesser mortals” (her parents, her husband, her publishers, her friends and her own son, of whom she said made her “life a miseryâ€, and cut him out of her will), who would have dragged her down.
Muriel Spark published roughly a novel a year, including my favorite, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) which, la crème de la crème (as Miss Brodie would say), is the book which has secured her popularity.
“She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin.”
