![]() ![]() I was also interested in something called the Catholic Novel, and had written a thesis on the subject. I was beginning my own career as a novelist and critic when Muriel Spark began publishing her fiction: in the former capacity I was under the influence of the neorealism of the British “Angry Young Men” era, and as a critic I revered the great moderns like Henry James, Conrad, and Joyce. She had no obvious precursors, except perhaps Ivy Compton-Burnett, and it is interesting to learn from Martin Stannard that Spark was in her formative years an enthusiastic reader of Compton-Burnett-whose work however has a much narrower range of themes and effects than her own.Ī truly original writer is a very rare bird, whose appearance is apt to disconcert other birds and bird-watchers at first. ![]() She was the most original and innovative British novelist writing in the second half of the twentieth century, extending the possibilities of fiction for other writers as well as herself. Muriel Spark published twenty-two novels in her lifetime, in spite of beginning relatively late at the age of thirty-nine, and at least half of them are classics by the only criterion that really matters-they invite and reward repeated reading. ![]() Carl Mydans/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images ![]()
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