Muriel Spark - The Biography by Martin Stannard (2009)

A biography of the Scottish novelist, critic, and poet, Muriel Spark (1918-2006), whose most famous book was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Book Review:  Muriel Spark: The Biography is a thoroughly researched beast of a book (over 536 pages of text), but the writing takes some time to get used to and to get through. After a couple hundred pages either the writing improved or I became accustomed to it. The author was personally selected by Spark herself, and had access to her personal papers, so I can't imagine a more thorough or better researched biography for a while to come. The literary discussion of her work was not particularly helpful and seemed a bit haphazard, as if patched together from various sources. But it certainly provides a view of her work and if he had access to Spark's opinions, then worth even more than that. The author is partial to Spark, which is to be expected, and takes her side of controversies whenever possible, at times vehemently so. This did not, however, detract from the book for me as it was fairly obvious when he was being partial.

Two main themes come out of Muriel Spark: The Biography. First, is that of Muriel Spark as a strong individual with a iron point of view that rarely bent for others, even those closest to her. Her first dedication was to her writing above all, and woe to those who interrupted her while at her vocation. She converted from a Jewish childhood to Catholicism, traveled to Africa to get married and have a child, charged headlong into the male dominated London literary establishment of the '40s and '50s, and while there were setbacks, she never stopped demanding, fighting, to construct her own unique future.

Second, her novels are more autobiographical than they might first appear, but never blatantly so as she was an almost violently private person, even while often living in the public eye. In her novels, the plot, even the characters, serve to create her moral, religious, and philosophical discussions. But these discussions are never clear cut, with all the paradoxes and ambiguities of humanity reflected: there is no one point of view, contradictions are always included, her contrariness no different than simply that of life. And despite how often her discussions touched on religion, her view of the omnipotent was not that commonly imagined, far different than the anthropomorphized deity one might expect.

I haven't read any other biographies of Spark, but Muriel Spark: The Biography must be close to authoritative for the near future, only wanting more lucid writing and incisive literary analysis. [3.5 Stars]