# British author Muriel Spark dies

Category: book Nook

## Post 1 by TexasRed (I'll have the last word, thank you!) on Saturday, 15-Apr-2006 12:50:14

British author Muriel Spark dies
By Phil Stewart 54 minutes ago
ROME (Reuters) - Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark, best known for her
book "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," has died in Italy at the age of 88 and
was
buried in Tuscany on Saturday.
"She was very open. Both fascinating and down-to-earth at the same time. Her
loss will be very difficult to overcome," Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor
of the little Italian town where she lived, told Reuters by telephone.
Spark wrote 24 novels, several short stories and three well-received
biographies during her long career.
But she shot to fame with her 1962 fictional work "The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie," a tense novel about a young teacher stirring thoughts of
emancipation
at an Edinburgh girls' school in staid society between the two world wars.
The book was made into a critically acclaimed film starring
Maggie Smith
in 1969.
A self-styled "experimentalist," she was hailed as being far ahead of her
time both in her style of writing and the subjects she chose, using her
sharp
satire to expose pettiness and vanity pervading all facets of life and
death.
In the novel "Memento Mori" in 1959 she wrote: "Death, when it approaches,
ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy
of
life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as
well live on the whites of eggs."
Spark died on Friday in a hospital in Florence after battling health
problems since last year.
Born Muriel Sarah Camberg, Spark moved to Italy in the late 1960s and has
lived in the small town of Civitella in Val di Chiana for 27 years. Her
funeral
will be held there on Saturday.
Spark, born in February 1918 in Edinburgh to a Jewish father and Anglican
mother, married in 1937 and moved to Southern Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe --
but
the marriage did not last.
During World War Two she worked for the British Foreign Office on anti-Nazi
propaganda.
She converted to Catholicism in 1954 and moved to Italy in 1967.
Twice nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize -- in 1968 for "Public
Image" and in 1981 for "Loitering with Intent" -- Spark won the Bram Stoker
prize
in 1987 for her biography of Mary Shelley.
Made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, Spark has
lived with artist Penelope Jardine for 30 years.
She was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters in 1978, and Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France
in 1996.
Her last novel, "The Finishing School," was published in 2004.

## Post 2 by Siriusly Severus (The ESTJ 1w9 3w4 6w7 The Taskmaste) on Sunday, 03-Feb-2008 19:00:01

How, sad... Yeah, I'll check her out.