Background

Abstract

Mrs Spark is intensely reticent, outside her novels, about her life. She rarely gives interviews, and, living in Italy, she keeps her distance from day-to-day literary gossip in London and New York. Her desire to keep private the story of her life seems related to her thrift as a writer. She gives the impression of being anxious not to dissipate her material; of hoarding it, with a novelist’s awareness of its potential, and ultimately refining it through the alchemic process of her art. Indeed, the best account of Muriel Spark as an artist is given in her novel Loitering with Intent. This is clearly autobiographical, and extremely valuable in its revelation of how a writer’s life and work are deeply interwoven. Nevertheless, to attempt to separate the strands is a relevant activity on the part of the literary critic, a point which Mrs Spark herself appreciated in her critical works on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Emily Brontë and John Masefield. In these studies she includes their life-stories, from which she deduces a variety of influences on their writings. She has, however, warned of the dangers inherent in compiling biography from fiction: ‘I believe that fiction should generally be considered a suspect witness (and if it is not stranger than truth, it ought to be).’¹ Naturally, biographical inferences from a novelist’s work should be made with caution, just as interviews, correspondence, biography and autobiography should be regarded as approximations, facets of the truth, and not the whole story.