Where to Start with Muriel Spark: A Reading Guide

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) is the Scottish novelist whose twenty-two short, precise, formally inventive novels make her one of the most significant British writers of the twentieth century. Born in Edinburgh and educated there, she converted to Catholicism in 1954 — a conversion she described as the most important event of her life and whose theology inflects her fiction throughout. Her novels are short (she distrusted the long novel), her sentences are exact, and her combination of dark comedy with moral seriousness is unlike any other writer. She lived for much of her later life in Rome and Tuscany. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is her most celebrated work; her other novels include The Comforters, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Girls of Slender Means, and The Driver’s Seat. She is one of the essential writers of British literary fiction.

Where to Start: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

The essential Spark — and one of the most formally accomplished short novels in British fiction. Jean Brodie, a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s, is in her prime. She selects six girls as her special set and educates them in the things she considers important: Renaissance art, the nature of love, and (increasingly troublingly) a romanticised view of Mussolini. She is charismatic, passionate, and dangerously convinced of her own exceptional nature.

Spark reveals from the early pages that one of the Brodie set will eventually betray Miss Brodie to the headmistress — and the novel’s pleasure lies in understanding how and why this happens, what it cost, and what it means. The narrative structure (moving freely between the 1930s and the characters’ futures) creates a particular kind of dramatic irony: we see events in the knowledge of their consequences, which makes the comedy darker and the tragedy more precise. One of the great British novels.

The Driver’s Seat (1970)

Spark’s most disturbing novel — and her most radical. Lise, a woman who has been described as wearing garments that do not match, travels from her Northern European home city to Rome. The novel reveals almost immediately that she will be murdered; the narrative traces her search for ‘her type’ of man, which turns out to be the man she has selected to kill her.

The novel refuses any comfortable psychological explanation for Lise’s behaviour: she is neither mad nor suicidal in any conventional sense; she has simply decided, with cold precision, to take control of the one event (her death) that most people submit to passively. Spark’s prose is completely controlled: the free indirect discourse gives us access to Lise’s consciousness without understanding it, which is exactly the right distance. At under 120 pages, it is one of the most unsettling reading experiences in British fiction.

Reading Muriel Spark

Spark’s fiction is built on a specific theological conviction: that the universe has a providential structure, and that human beings’ attempts to act as if they were its authors are both comic and presumptuous. Miss Jean Brodie believes she is God’s elect; Lise in The Driver’s Seat attempts to script her own end; the characters in Memento Mori receive telephone calls reminding them they must die and respond with more or less dignity. The dark comedy comes from the gap between the characters’ pretensions and the universe’s indifference to them. Begin with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — the most celebrated and the most fully achieved demonstration of her gifts; read The Driver’s Seat for the most radical and the most disturbing.