Republic of uzbekistan karshi state university english philology faculty

1.2. Writing activity of the author.
Muriel Spark in full Dame Muriel Sarah Spark, née Camberg, (born February 1, 1918, Edinburgh, Scotland—died April 13, 2006, Italy), British writer exceptional recognized for the satire and wit with which the serious subject matters of her novels presented.Spark used to be trained in Edinburgh and later spent some years in Central Africa; the latter served as the putting for her first volume of short stories, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (1958). She again to Great Britain throughout World War II and labored for the Foreign Office, writing propaganda. She then served as widespread secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review (1947–49). She later posted a sequence of crucial biographies of literary figures and variants of 19th-century letters, which includes Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951; rev. ed., Mary Shelley, 1987), John Masefield (1953), and The Brontë Letters (1954). Spark transformed to Roman Catholicism in 1954. Until 1957 Spark published only criticism and poetry. With the guide of The Comforters (1957), however, her intelligence as a novelist—an ability to create disturbing, compelling characters and a disquieting experience of ethical ambiguity—was right now evident. Her third novel, Memento Mori (1959), was once adapted for the stage in 1964 and for television in 1992. Her best-known novel is possibly The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which centres on a domineering teacher at a girls’ school. It also grew to become famous in its stage (1966) and film (1969) versions.
Some critics discovered Spark’s formerly novels minor; some of these works—such as The Comforters, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963)—are characterised by humorous and barely unsettling fantasy. The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) marked a departure towards weightier themes, and the novels that followed—The Driver’s Seat (1970, movie 1974), Not to Disturb (1971), and The Abbess of Crewe (1974)—have a particularly sinister tone. Among Spark’s later novels are Territorial Rights (1979), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), Reality and Dreams (1996), and The Finishing School (2004). Other works include Collected Poems I (1967) and Collected Stories (1967). She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, to a Jewish father and an Anglican mother, and was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls. She is also known by several other names: Muriel Spark, Muriel Sarah Spark, Muriel Sarah Camberg, Muriel Sarah Spark Stanford, Evelyn Cavallo, and Dame Muriel Sarah Spark. In 1934-1935 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.⁵
.On September 3, 1937, she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son, Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she claimed that her husband was a manic depressive prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel had left Sydney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in 1944 and worked in intelligence during World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to establish residence in England. Robin returned to Britain with his father, and was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.Spark and her son had strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognized as Jewish. The devout Catholic Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an inquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'.[ It was reported in the Daily Mail on April 22 2006 that her only son Robin, 68, had not attended her funeral service in Tuscany.
Spark began writing seriously after the war, under her married name, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947, she became editor of the Poetry Review. In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic … that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do."In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing: "I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that–would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion—whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know—but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…" Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was more successful. Spark displayed originality of subject and tone, and featured a character who knew she was in a novel. Spark told her characters' stories from the past and the future simultaneously. It is clear that James Gillespie's High School was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in the novel.⁶
After living in New York City briefly, where New Yorker magazine published the entire book of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she moved to Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine in 1968. In the early 1970s they settled in the Italian region of Tuscany and lived in the village of Civitella della Chiana, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumors of lesbian relationships from her time in New York onwards, although Spark and her friends denied these accusations. She left her entire estate to Jardine, taking measures to ensure her son received .
She refused to agree to the publication of a biography of her written by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine now has the right of approval to publication and the book is unlikely to appear soon. According to A. S. Byatt, "She was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer."
She received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the British Literature Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature.Muriel Spark, in an interview, put her writing, and her own life in perspective: "I don't see what else you can draw on for fiction but your life, not only your own life but what you've learned or read from other people's lives. It's one's own experience after all, don't you think?"
Later in the interview she addresses the relationship of truth and lies in fiction, "Fiction is lies. And in order to do this you have got to have a very good sense of what is the truth. You can't do the art of deception, of deceiving people so they suspend disbelief, without having that sense very strongly indeed… Of course there is a certain truth that emerges from a novel, but you've got to know the difference between fiction and truth before you can write the novel at all. A lot of people don't—a lot of novelists don't—and what you get then is a mess … people run away with the idea that what they are writing is the truth…. You must be all the time aware it's not." ⁷
Assessing her own work, she states, "I think it's very difficult to put my work in any genre and under any label—very very difficult," she admits. It bothers people. I write as a Scot and I write as a Catholic," she says. "I don't even have to think about it. That's there like your freckles, you know." Not much later she says something I've read her say before, in an interview from 1970: "It just comes natural to me. I just construct it as I go along. It's a built-in sense."