Muriel Spark's Stylish Spinsters: Miss Jean Brodie Past Her Prime

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Muriel Spark's Stylish Spinsters: Miss Jean Brodie Past Her Prime Muriel Spark’s Stylish Spinsters: Miss Jean Brodie Past Her Prime Hope Howell Hodgkins Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) Fashion succeeds by promising to annul the fragmented conditions of modernity with the imposition of a coherent subjectivity. Leslie Rabine / Joanne Finkelstein Baudelairean dédoublement: The wise man is “one who had acquired by habit a power of rapid self-division (dédoublement) and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego.” -D’Essence de la Rire Alexander Moffat, 1984 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) “. head up, like Sybil Thorndike, her nose arched and proud.” She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot. Alfred, Lord Tennyson “The Lady of Shalott” The Lady of Shalott, William Holman Hunt, 1889-92 (Wadsworth Museum of Art) The Girls of Slender Means Edinburgh Festival 2009 Edwardian blue silk damask dress: “Bluebell” Bluebell the cat Schiaparelli Pink Schiaparelli hat, 1948 Schiaparelli dress, 1938 The Driver’s Seat, 1970 The Driver’s Seat (European title: Identikit), 1974 Mona Washbourne & Elizabeth Taylor Her own work of art: Spark in Rome, 1970 (Jerry Bauer, NLS) “Plump, motherly”: Spark with her son, early 1940s Stylish into old age. [A]n artist is only an artist on condition that he is a double man and that there is not one single phenomenon of his double nature of which he is ignorant. Charles Baudelaire, “D’Essence de la rire”.
Recommended publications
  • The Best According To
    Books | The best according to... http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329724792­99819,00.html The best according to... Interviews by Stephen Moss Friday February 23, 2007 Guardian Andrew Motion Poet laureate Choosing the greatest living writer is a harmless parlour game, but it might prove more than that if it provokes people into reading whoever gets the call. What makes a great writer? Philosophical depth, quality of writing, range, ability to move between registers, and the power to influence other writers and the age in which we live. Amis is a wonderful writer and incredibly influential. Whatever people feel about his work, they must surely be impressed by its ambition and concentration. But in terms of calling him a "great" writer, let's look again in 20 years. It would be invidious for me to choose one name, but Harold Pinter, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Michael Longley, John Berger and Tom Stoppard would all be in the frame. AS Byatt Novelist Greatness lies in either (or both) saying something that nobody has said before, or saying it in a way that no one has said it. You need to be able to do something with the English language that no one else does. A great writer tells you something that appears to you to be new, but then you realise that you always knew it. Great writing should make you rethink the world, not reflect current reality. Amis writes wonderful sentences, but he writes too many wonderful sentences one after another. I met a taxi driver the other day who thought that.
    [Show full text]
  • Literature Culture Linguistics Muriel Spark
    2018.NEXUS 02 edita: Cristina Alsina Rísquez FREDERICK DOUGLASS &MARTIN LUTHER LITERATURE KING & CULTURE MURIEL SPARK WILLFRED OWEN LINGUISTICS MATTI RISSANEN DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN M.A.K. HALLIDAY Presidente ALBERTO LÁZARO LAFUENTE Universidad de Alcalá Secretario ANTONIO BALLESTEROS GONZÁLEZ 2018.NEXUS 02 UNED Vocal 1a CRISTINA ALSINA RÍSQUEZ Copyright De los textos, sus autores. Universitat de Barcelona Editor CRISTINA ALSINA RÍSQUEZ Vocal 2a ROSARIO ARIAS DOBLAS Universidad de Málaga Graphic TONI CAMPS design useixantaquatre.com Tesorera CRISTINA SUÁREZ GÓMEZ Universitat de les Illes Balears ISSN 1697-4646 http://www.aedean.org nexus 2018-02 ÍNDICE LITERATURE AND CULTURE AND LITERATURE TRIBUTES MAR GALLEGO Universidad de Huelva 7 Frederick Douglass & Martin Luther King Commemorating Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King: African American Rhetoric and Black Masculinity BERTA CANO ECHEVARRÍA Universidad de Valladolid 19 Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen’s Search for Words TOMÁS MONTERREY Universidad de La Laguna FRANCISCO GARCÍA LORENZANA Y PEPA LINARES 25 Traductores de Muriel Spark Esplendida´ Spark In Memoriam. 1918-2006 LINGUISTICS TRIBUTES MARÍA JOSÉ LÓPEZ-COUSO & BELÉN MÉNDEZ-NAYA University of Santiago de Compostela 32 Matti Rissanen In Memoriam: Matti Rissanen, the linguist, the friend BEGOÑA BELLÉS FORTUÑO Universitat Jaume I 38 Deborah Schiffrin In Memoriam 3 nexus 2018-02 ÍNDICE LINGUISTICS TRIBUTES DANIEL GARCÍA VELASCO Universidad de Oviedo M.A.K. Halliday 41 El lenguaje segun M.A.K. Halliday ´ LITERATURE AND CULTURE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH PAPERS RESEARCH CLARA ESCODA Universitat de Barcelona 45 “Much Deeper than That”: Hegemonic Emotional Experiences and Affective Dissidences in Martin Crimp’s In the Republic of Happiness (2012) Research Project: British Theatre in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Affect, Community LINGUISTICS RESEARCH PAPERS RESEARCH MARÍA F.
    [Show full text]
  • Repetition and Narrative Time in Muriel Spark's 'The Bachelors', 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye' and 'A Member of the Fa
    Page !1 of !26 Gaenor Burchett-Vass March 2014 Repetition and narrative time in Muriel Spark’s ‘The Bachelors’, ‘The Ballad of Peckham Rye’ and ‘A Member of the Family’ ‘Story time’ is not the same thing as ‘narrative time’. The Russian Formalists, active during the early years of the twentieth century, used the terms ‘fabula’ and ‘sjuzhet’ to refer respectively to the ‘chronological sequence of events’ and the ‘order and manner in which [these events] are actually presented in the narrative’ (Jefferson and Robey, 1986: 39). Scenes which occur once in story time, the fabula, can be repeated many times in the narrative, or the sjuzhet, and any such scene will be brought into prominence, or foregrounded, thereby inviting the reader to assign significance to it. Genette’s work on ‘frequency’ in the second half of the twentieth century is built on the foundations established by the Formalists. In his Narrative Discourse, first published in French as Figures III in 1972, Genette distinguishes three possible methods available to the writer for recounting events: the singulative, repetitive and iterative. More recent work among narratologists has pinpointed the difficulties inherent in the fabula/sjuzhet distinction, briefly summarised as follows. The fabula is essentially a construct, put together by the reader at the time of reading and revised to create a final version once the text has been read. It has no external existence unless the fabula and sjuzhet can be seen to be absolutely identical. A ‘primary’ narrative must be identified to enable the construction of a fabula: this is not always straightforward and disagreements cannot easily be resolved.
    [Show full text]
  • Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark Edited by Robert E
    Maley, W. (2017) Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark edited by Robert E. Hosmer Jr. Religion and Literature, 48(2), [Book Review] This is the author’s final accepted version. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/124247/ Deposited on: 03 October 2017 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark. Robert E. Hosmer Jr., ed. Notre Dame University Press, 2014. vii + 295 pp. $35 paper. Robert Hosmer’s introduction – gleeful, gossipy, gushing – sets the tone for this compelling collection of intimate encounters with the late Dame Muriel Spark by connoisseurs of her poetic art. The editor has assembled a veritable Brodie Set who can scarce contain their enthusiasm for their prime subject. Hosmer is clear about the book’s aims, hoping “readers of this volume will gain a keen sense of Muriel Spark as a person, derived in good measure from reading her own words, unfiltered and uncensored, and a considerable critical appreciation of her work as articulated by some of her best readers”. Of the sixteen essays gathered here, seven are previously published, so I will pass over the elegant insights of my colleague Gerry Carruthers, as well as those of Frank Kermode, John Lanchester, Doris Lessing, John Mortimer, and John Updike, and the fascinating interview Hosmer conducted with Spark in 2005. The volume opens with a section entitled “The Work”, in which Gabriel Josipovici’s erudite exploration of Spark’s critique of fiction within her fiction is the opening essay: “The villains in Muriel Spark’s novels are those who cannot see the difference between fiction and reality.
    [Show full text]
  • Interrogating the Validity of Truth in Muriel Spark's the Ballad Of
    International Journal of Humanities Social Sciences and Education (IJHSSE) Volume 8, Issue 7, July 2021, PP 233-248 ISSN 2349-0373 (Print) & ISSN 2349-0381 (Online) https://doi.org/10.20431/2349-0381.0807026 www.arcjournals.org Fictionalised Reality? : Interrogating the Validity of Truth in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye Dr. Lin, Hsin-Ying Associate Professor Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Chung Cheng University, Chia- Yi, Taiwan *Corresponding Author: Dr. Lin, Hsin-Ying, Associate Professor Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan. Abstract: Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) ruptures time and blurs the boundary between reality and illusion. The story of lower-class life in an industrial suburb south of London is undercharged by the ‘balladic’ demonic villain (or hero?), Dougal Douglas. This controversial duality of a Satanic (evil- seductive) character who invokes fantasy into daily life is characteristic of Muriel Spark’s delight in playing the game of fiction and realism, and of her refusal to follow the traditional time scheme of fiction. My argument in this paper will centre on the implication of the boundary between fiction and realism, and on how this implication contributes to the justification of a villain as a demonic hero. If there exists only one question, it might be: who are the villains who are making chaotic rumors? If the deceptions are a reflection of human desires, we may ascertain that fiction is another name for lies, and that the liar as a Satanic character can be regarded as a demonic hero, for he exposes human moral disease.
    [Show full text]
  • Recommended Reading for AP Literature & Composition
    Recommended Reading for AP Literature & Composition Titles from Free Response Questions* Adapted from an original list by Norma J. Wilkerson. Works referred to on the AP Literature exams since 1971 (specific years in parentheses). A Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner (76, 00) Adam Bede by George Eliot (06) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (80, 82, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 05, 06, 07, 08) The Aeneid by Virgil (06) Agnes of God by John Pielmeier (00) The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (97, 02, 03, 08) Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (00, 04, 08) All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (00, 02, 04, 07, 08) All My Sons by Arthur Miller (85, 90) All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (95, 96, 06, 07, 08) America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan (95) An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (81, 82, 95, 03) The American by Henry James (05, 07) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (80, 91, 99, 03, 04, 06, 08) Another Country by James Baldwin (95) Antigone by Sophocles (79, 80, 90, 94, 99, 03, 05) Anthony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (80, 91) Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler (94) Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer (76) As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (78, 89, 90, 94, 01, 04, 06, 07) As You Like It by William Shakespeare (92 05. 06) Atonement by Ian McEwan (07) Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson (02, 05) The Awakening by Kate Chopin (87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 99, 02, 04, 07) B "The Bear" by William Faulkner (94, 06) Beloved by Toni Morrison (90, 99, 01, 03, 05, 07) A Bend in the River by V.
    [Show full text]
  • A Muriel Spark Bibliography
    A Muriel Spark Bibliography 1. Texts by Muriel Spark Novels Spark, M., The Comforters (London: Macmillan, 1957). —, Robinson (London: Macmillan, 1958). —, Memento Mori (London: Macmillan, 1959). —, The Bachelors (London: Macmillan, 1960). —, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (London; Macmillan, 1960). —, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (London: Macmillan, 1961). —, The Girls of Slender Means (London: Macmillan, 1963). —, The Mandlebaum Gate (London: Macmillan, 1965). —, The Public Image (London: Macmillan, 1968). —, The Driver’s Seat (London: Macmillan, 1970). —, Not to Disturb (London: Macmillan, 1971). —, The Hothouse by the East River (London: Macmillan, 1973). —, The Abbess of Crewe (London: Macmillan, 1974). —, The Takeover (London: Macmillan, 1976). —, Territorial Rights (London: Macmillan, 1979). —, Loitering with Intent (London: Macmillan, 1981). —, The Only Problem (London: Bodley Head, 1984). —, A Far Cry from Kensington (London: Macmillan, 1988). —, Symposium (London: Macmillan, 1990). —, Reality and Dreams (London: Constable, 1996). —, Aiding and Abetting (London: Constable, 2000). Autobiography —, Curriculum Vitae (London: Constable, 1992). Drama —, Voices at Play (London: Macmillan, 1961), includes radio drama. —, Doctors of Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1963). Stories —, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1958). —, Voices at Play (London: Macmillan, 1961), includes short stories. —, Collected Stories I (London: Macmillan, 1967) —, The Stories of Muriel Spark (London: Macmillan, 1987). —, Bang-Bang You’re Dead and Other Stories (St Albans: Granada, 1982). —, Collected Short Stories (London: Macmillan, 1995). —, Madam X (London: Colophon Press, 1996). 230 A Muriel Spark Bibliography 231 —, Harper and Wilton (London: Colophon Press, 1996). —, Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories (London: New Directions Books, 1997). —, The Quest for Lavishes Ghost (London: The Cuckoo Press, 1998).
    [Show full text]
  • CLASSIC HIGHLIGHTS Contents
    Spring 2018 CLASSIC HIGHLIGHTS Contents For more information please go to our website to browse our shelves and find out more about what we do and who we represent. Centenary Celebrations 2018 p. 5 Troublesome Women pp. 6-10 Short Stories pp. 11-17 Classics of Our Time pp.18-22 Agents US Rights: Georgia Glover; Veronique Baxter, Andrew Gordon Film & TV Rights: Nicky Lund; Georgina Ruffhead, Claire Israel, Penelope Killick Translation Rights: Alice Howe: [email protected] Giulia Bernabè: [email protected] Direct: Arabic; Croatia; Estonia; France; Germany; Greece; Israel; Latvia; Lithuania; Netherlands; Scandinavia; Slovenia; Spain and Spanish in Latin America; Sub-agented: Czech Republic; Italy; Poland; Romania; Slovakia; Turkey Emily Randle: [email protected] Direct: Afrikaans; Albanian; all Indian languages; Brazil; Macedonia; Portugual; Russia; Ukraine; Vietnam; Wales; plus miscellaneous requests Subagented: China; Bulgaria; Hungary; Indonesia; Japan; Korea; Serbia; Taiwan; Thailand Allison Cole: [email protected] Children’s titles in all languages Contact t: +44 (0)20 7434 5900 f: +44 (0)20 7437 1072 www.davidhigham.co.uk CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS MURIEL SPARK 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of classic writer, Dame Muriel Spark Born in Edinburgh in 1918, Muriel Spark originally worked as a secretary and then a poet and literary journalist. She was completely unknown and impoverished until she started her career as a story writer and novelist. Then everything changed overnight. A poet and novelist, she also wrote children’s books, radio plays, a comedy Doctors of Philosophy, (first performed in London in 1962 and published 1963) and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures, including Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë.
    [Show full text]
  • Anderton, Marja Arendina Louise (1994) the Power to Destroy False Images: Eight British Women Writers and Society 1945-1968
    Anderton, Marja Arendina Louise (1994) The power to destroy false images: eight British women writers and society 1945-1968. PhD thesis http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4409/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] THE POWER TO DESTROY FALSE IMAGES: Eight British Women Writers and Society 1945-1968 Marja Arendina Louise Anderton Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow February 1994 @M.A.L. Anderton 1994 Acknowledgements As this thesis was written over several years and in a period of great change in my life, I feel that at this pOint I ought to express my gratitude to the people who encouraged me not to give up. First of all, of course, this is my supervisor, Barbara Littlewood, who very kindly helped me wherever she could in spite of the great distance between us for most of the time. Secondly, I would like to thank Iris Murdoch, Penelope Mortimer, A.S. Byatt, and Margaret Drabble for allowing me to use their correspondence here.
    [Show full text]
  • Two of the Great Scottish Novelists: Muriel Spark and Robin Jenkins
    Riach, A. (2017) Two of the great Scottish novelists: Muriel Spark and Robin Jenkins. National, 2017, 29 June. This is the author’s final accepted version. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/161609/ Deposited on: 01 May 2018 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Two Great Scottish Novelists: Robin Jenkins and Muriel Spark Alan Riach High among the major novelists of postwar Scotland, in the quantity as well as quality of their output and dedication to their art, are Robin Jenkins (1912-2005) and Muriel Spark (1918-2006). Jenkins’s earlier novels are set in Scotland, and The Changeling (1958) is a connection between the Romantic patriotism declared so boldly by Walter Scott in the Sixth Canto of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) to the utter depths of cynicism uttered by Renton, the main character in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993). In Scott’s poem, the spectacle of the Scottish landscape is the subject of rhapsody: “Breathes there the man with soul so dead / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!” O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood... In his poem “Retrieving and Renewing”, written in 2004 for the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Edwin Morgan quotes this: Breathes there the man With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan Would show his fault was ignorance: Don’t follow him.
    [Show full text]
  • Angels, Dancers, Mermaids: the Hidden History of Peckham in Muriel Spark's the Ballad of Peckham
    Angels, Dancers, Mermaids: The Hidden History of Peckham in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye Jan Gorak Scottish Literary Review, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2014, pp. 29-46 (Article) Published by Association for Scottish Literary Studies For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548090 [ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 17:57 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] JAN GORAK Angels, Dancers, Mermaids: The Hidden History of Peckham in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye Abstract What led Muriel Spark, who is generally regarded as an author alive to the imaginative possibilities of milieu, to set The Ballad of Peckham Rye in a drab south London suburb? This essay examines Spark’s acerbic representation of suburban modernity through the lenses of urban, cultural, and folk history. Viewed through these multiple prisms, the homogenized space of Spark’s novel reveals a latent dis- ruptive reserve that unexpectedly aligns it with some of the most dynamic aspects of Scottish tradition. Sandwiched between two of Muriel Spark’s major Catholic works, Memento Mori (1959)andThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) has attracted considerable critical commentary but little agree- ment about why Spark foregrounds such an insipid milieu. Edinburgh’s dual legacy as scienti¢c centre and site of theological con£ict shapes Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, while Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net shakes philosophical capital from the bohemian mobility of West London. But what imaginative possibilities does a drab South London dormitory suburb o¡er Spark? With its interchangeable co¡ee bars, dance halls, and burger joints, Peckham seems to be the quintessential mid-century anony- mous place.
    [Show full text]
  • Autumn 2003 JSSE Twentieth Anniversary
    Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 41 | Autumn 2003 JSSE twentieth anniversary Muriel Spark - b. 1918 Jeanne Devoize and Claude Pamela Valette Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/328 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2003 Number of pages: 243-254 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Jeanne Devoize and Claude Pamela Valette, « Muriel Spark - b. 1918 », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 41 | Autumn 2003, Online since 31 July 2008, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/328 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved Muriel Spark - b. 1918 1 Muriel Spark - b. 1918 Jeanne Devoize and Claude Pamela Valette EDITOR'S NOTE Interviewed by Jeanne Devoize and Pamela Valette, “Narrative Techniques in the Short Story”, Conference January 21, 1989, First published in JSSE n°13, 1989. 1 Muriel Spark’s versatility — a novelist with some twenty titles, a playwright, a biographer and literary critic, and of course a short story writer — her delightful unconventionality, the incisiveness of her wit, her narrative power, are only a few of the traits that make of her one of the best loved and most widely‑read British writers of our times. Jeanne DEVOIZE: How did you become a writer originally? How did you decide it would be your profession? Muriel SPARK: Well, I was quite a child when I started writing and I wrote poetry. I always thought of writing poetry. But gradually, when I was about 30, I started writing narrative poetry which told a story, and from that I moved into the short story, encouraged by the fact I won a prize with my first short story which was called “The Seraph and the Zambezi”.
    [Show full text]