The Women Of Muriel Spark Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of The Women Of Muriel Spark book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic) by Muriel Spark Pdf
"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."
Having led a successful, comfortable life, Harvey Gotham retires to the French countryside to pursue bookish obsessions and writing. But when the French police discover his estranged wife's involvement in a terrorist group, suspicion falls on Gotham himself and a series of misfortunes threaten to destroy everything he holds dear.
Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.
In Muriel Spark's fantastic first novel, the only things that aren't ambiguous are her matchless originality and glittering wit. Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. She has an unusual problem - she realises she is in a novel. Her fellow characters are also possibly deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread - could his elderly grandmother really be a smuggler? And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England's leading Satanist.
'Muriel Spark's most celebrated novel . . . This ruthlessly and destructively romantic school ma'am is one of the giants of post-war fiction' Independent 'A brilliantly psychological fugue' Observer The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Muriel Spark's most significant and celebrated novel, and remains as dazzling as when it was first published in 1961. Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher unlike any other, proud and cultured, enigmatic and freethinking; a romantic, with progressive, sometimes shocking ideas and aspirations for the girls in her charge. At the Marcia Blaine Academy she takes a select group of girls under her wing. Spellbound by Miss Brodie's unconventional teaching, these devoted pupils form the Brodie set. But as the girls enter their teenage years and they become increasingly drawn in by Miss Brodie's personal life, her ambitions for them take a startling and dark turn with devastating consequences.
The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday). Muriel Spark ended was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hers is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters, and with Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Bachelors rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine.
Mrs Hawkins, a comfortably large young widow, is often called upon to administer advice to colleagues and neighbours. But she follows her own advice, too, and turns from Mrs Hawkins into Nancy: quite a different proposition.
A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times) The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a wickedly farcical tale of an English factory town turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Dougal Douglas is hired to do “human research” into the lives of the workers, Douglas stirs up mutiny and murder.
Recent critics have affirmed the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of defining modern comedy; at the same time, some feminist scholars are seeking to understand the special comedy often present in literature written by women. Comedy and the Woman Writer responds to both these concerns of recent criticism: feminist literary theory and theories of comedy. Judy Little develops a critical apparatus for identifying feminist comedy in recent fiction, especially the radical political and psychological implications of this comedy, and then applies and tests her theory by examining the novels of Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark. Despite recent scholarly attention to Woolf, the profound comedy of her work has been largely overlooked, and the comic fiction of Spark has seldom had the responsible and attentive criticism that it deserves. The introductory chapter draws upon anthropology and sociology, as well as literary criticism and the fiction of feminist writers such as Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Monique Wittig, to define a modern feminist comedy. Four central chapters then explore the implications of this comedy in the novels of Woolf and Spark. Little distinguishes between, on the one hand, several varieties of traditional comedy and satire and, on the other, the festive or “liminal” comedy to which feminist comedy belongs. Both Woolf and Spark mock centuries-old mythic patterns and behaviors deriving from basic social norms, as well as the values emerging from these norms. It is one thing, the author points out, to find “manners” amusing, to scourge vices, or to mock the follies of lovers; it is a much more drastic act of the imagination to mock the very norms against which comedy has traditionally judged vices, follies, and eccentricities. While the comedy of Woolf and Spark has some precedent in festive or liminal celebrations, during which even basic values and behavior are abandoned, feminist comedy displays its radical nature by implying that there is no resolution to the inverted overturned world, the world in revolutionary transition. The final chapter considers briefly, in the light of the critical model of feminist comedy, the work of several other twentieth-century writers, including Jean Rhys, Penelope Moritmer, and Margaret Drabble. The presence of radical comedy in the fiction of these and other writers suggests the need for continuing attention to the theory of feminist comedy proposed in this study.
'One of her funniest novels . . . Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful' ALI SMITH In The Finishing School Muriel Spark is once again at her biting, satirical best. On the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, a struggling would-be novelist and his wife run a finishing school of questionable reputation to keep the funds flowing. When a seventeen-year-old student's writing career begins to show great promise, tensions begin to run high. A keen portrait of devouring regret, psychological unravelling and the glittering promise of youth, The Finishing School is the perfect natural partner to Muriel Spark's most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
"The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe." An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and--plunged into scandal--the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.
January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as "an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it." In Robinson, Muriel Spark's wonderful second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping-pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, and -- perhaps -- murder.
