Angels Dining at the Ritz: The Early Novels

Abstract

Muriel Spark’s success in the 1951 Observer short story competition did not have the effect of leading her to embrace the art of fiction promptly and wholeheartedly, and it was much later in the decade before she published her first novel. Its composition had begun almost by accident: as already indicated, the suggestion came from the publishing firm of Macmillan, and the advance against royalties enabled her to retire to a country cottage in Kent and to write The Comforters. Probably no one could then have guessed either that it would turn out to be the first of seven novels published during a seven-year period, or that thirty years later she would still be writing fiction.

The Comforters (1957); Robinson (1958); Memento Mori (1959); The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960); The Bachelors (1960); The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); The Girls of Slender Means (1963)