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The Ghost of Muriel Spark
In her work and life the writer was obsessed with biography – but when she authorised her own she loathed it.
Because she was a hoarder who had thrown away nothing on paper for 40 years, there was little research for Stannard to do: the facts of Spark’s life were organised into box files equivalent in height to an airport control tower, in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and in width to the wingspan of a Boeing 777. Aged 19, after a first-class education at the school on which she modelled Marcia Blaine in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark sailed to Southern Rhodesia to marry a schoolteacher who suffered, she soon discovered, from a severe mental illness. A further reflection on biography can be seen in The Comforters,where Caroline Rose, a writer and Catholic convert recovering, as Spark was, from a breakdown, believes that her thoughts are being recorded by a ghost at an invisible typewriter.
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