![]() ![]() This short novel contains multitudes, meaning it repays re-reading. ![]() Spark started life as a poet and it shows in her economy. (I told myself it's what she would have wanted.)Her best known work is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and it's a novel I still turn to all of thirty years later, finding fresh pleasures in its artfulness, its blending of comedy and tragedy, and the complexity of characterization. I ended up studying her novels for three years, intending to complete a PhD thesis-but actually starting my own writing career instead. Intimations of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Burns seemed to lie around every corner, but the author I became obsessed with was Muriel Spark. ![]() The course provided a steep learning curve and I just made it into the MA stream by the skin of my teeth, but I was getting to know and love the city, its history and (of course) its literary past. I was the first member of my family to go to university, and fairly gauche, but I did love books and was looking forward to studying English literature. It was only a 45-minute train ride from home, so I could visit my parents at the weekend. ![]() When it turned out that I was academic, Edinburgh University became my natural first choice. My parents didn't own a car and our trips to Scotland's capital city were few and far between. I grew up in a coal-mining village about 30 miles north of Edinburgh. ![]()
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