Spark, Muriel. (1918 - 2006).

L i f e

- of Jewish descent, Scottish birth, and Catholic religion (a convert)

W o r k

- preoccupied with the theological problem of evil, with moral issues in relation to fictional form, and with the narrative problems of self-consciously literary texts

- continues in the Scottish tradition of Robert Burns, James Hogg, and Robert Louis Stevenson x but: also finds new directions for the Gothic form

The Comforters (1957):

- a neurotic woman writer has to come to terms with her new-found Catholicism, her hallucinations, and her God-like status of a creator

- she works on a study of contemporary fiction and intents to write a novel about writing a novel

Memento Mori (1959):

- wry, blunt, and provocatively funny

- a diverse group of London geriatrics receive anonymous phone calls to remind them of their impending deaths

The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960):

- a Gothic novel concerned with a case of necromancy in a London suburb

- examines physical possession and obsession

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961):

- a Gothic novel of a distinctively comic chill

- concerned with the exercise of psychological power on the part of a teacher in a girls’ school during the rise of Fascism

- compares the manipulative teacher both to God and to Mussolini

The Driver’s Seat (1970):

- a carefully ordered present-tense Gothic novel

- the protagonist, a woman with a death-wish, plots the circumstances of her own violent murder

- the narrative challenges ideas of authorial authority and control

- contrasts the aberrance of what happens x its cool and precise delineation in the narrator's dispassionate, sometimes ironic, and sometimes disingenuous tone

The Abbess of Crewe (1974):

- a non-traditional Gothic novel

- completely avoids the excessive interest in sexuality of earlier Gothic novelists and sets the novel in an ‘upper-crust’ English convent

- the Abbess rules the convent and uses all the technological and propagandist skills of the 20^th century to manipulate her sisters