WRITER

Muriel Spark

1918 - 2006

Muriel Spark

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark (née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Muriel Spark has received more than 900,936 page views. Her biography is available in 40 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 39 in 2019). Muriel Spark is the 646th most popular writer (up from 803rd in 2019), the 478th most popular biography from United Kingdom (up from 655th in 2019) and the 55th most popular British Writer.

Muriel Spark is most famous for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was adapted into a stage play and film.

Memorability Metrics

900k
Page Views (PV)
65.00
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
40
Languages Editions (L)
13.75
Effective Languages (L*)
1.74
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Memento Mori

1958

The comforters

History

The twentieth century saw a proliferation of media discourses on colonialism and, later, decolonisation. Newspapers, periodicals, films, radio and TV broadcasts contributed to the construction of the image of the African “Other” across the colonial world. In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the role of these media in many colonial societies. As regards the Italian context, however, although several works have been published about the links between colonial culture and national identity, none have addressed the specific role of the media and their impact on collective memory (or lack thereof). This book fills that gap, providing a review of images and themes that have surfaced and resurfaced over time. The volume is divided into two sections, each organised around an underlying theme: while the first deals with visual memory and images from the cinema, radio, television and new media, the second addresses the role of the printed press, graphic novels and comics, photography and trading cards.

1957

The Mandelbaum Gate

1965

The girls of slender means

1963

The ballad of Peckham Rye

Philosophy

The aim of Ethics and Self-Cultivation is to establish and explore a new ‘cultivation of the self’ strand within contemporary moral philosophy. Although the revival of virtue ethics has helped reintroduce the eudaimonic tradition into mainstream philosophical debates, it has by and large been a revival of Aristotelian ethics combined with a modern preoccupation with standards for the moral rightness of actions. The essays comprising this volume offer a fresh approach to the eudaimonic tradition: instead of conditions for rightness of actions, it focuses on conceptions of human life that are best for the one living it. The first section of essays looks at the Hellenistic schools and the way they influenced modern thinkers like Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Hadot, and Foucault in their thinking about self-cultivation. The second section offers contemporary perspectives on ethical self-cultivation by drawing on work in moral psychology, epistemology of self-knowledge, philosophy of mind, and meta-ethics.

1960

Memento Mori

Fiction, Older people, Death

1958

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Teacher-student relationships, Women teachers, Girls

Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving.

1961

The ballad of Peckham Rye

Fiction, Good and evil, Satanism

1960

The Mandelbaum Gate

Fiction, Fiction in English, Interpersonal relations

1965

Jung gesellen =

Fiction, humorous, general, Bachelors, Fiction

A barrister, a priest, a detective, a lovelorn Irishman, a handwriting expert, a heinous spiritual medium -- the very British bachelors of Muriel Spark's supreme 1960 novel come in every stripe. First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs and shopping at Fortnum's, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented -- defrauded or stolen from; blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid seances -- and then plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that suit hovers pale, blank Patrick Seton, the medium. Meanwhile, horrors of every size plague the poor bachelors -- from the rising price of frozen peas to epileptic fits, forgeries, spiritualists foaming with protoplasm, and murder.

1960

The girls of slender means

Fiction, Young women, World War, 1939-1945

1963