people whom even children’s literature would corrupt

“It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.” - Muriel Spark

As with a lot of the things you think are useful when you are in college, I took a course in British Children's Literature, which turned me into a British Literature major (perhaps not useful, but prescient, in retrospect). In any event, one of the books we read was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. I was surprised at the time, and still am, that this was considered kid lit, particularly since its original publication date was 1961. It was quite risqué, as they say, what with its free love and general disdain for traditional English crumpets and tea. The book, ever-so charming on its surface, never completely hid what others have called Spark's tendency toward "dark tales of perversion." I wish YA novels were still written with this kind of subversive and thoughtful intellect.

Perhaps it was her beginnings as a writer of propaganda during WWII, perhaps it was her connection to Graham Greene and her Catholic conversion, perhaps her early influences of Mary Shelley and Evelyn Waugh, perhaps it was the Scot in her, or perhaps she was simply ahead of her time. Whatever the "perhaps," Dame Muriel Spark (nee Muriel Sarah Camberg), died April 15, at the age of 88.

---

obits
Guardian UK
New York Observer
works
Muriel Spark Archive - National Library of Scotland
What War and Peace ought to have been called - Slate Diaries


[Muriel Spark's desk at home in Tuscany, by Scottish journalist Alan Taylor in 2003]