Muriel Spark

Our guest today is none other than Stephen King, best-selling horror author and owner of the adorable 10-year-old corgi that you just heard, named Molly.

To quote the main character of Muriel Spark's novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life." Well, Stephen King got me, and I think many of us, at an impressionable age.

I was around 10 or 11 when I read his sprawling novel, It, and it kicked off a lifelong love of horror as a genre and of King as a writer.

I've since read many of his 70 some odd books more than once.

We were students together, and we both felt there must be some novels by women too.

We found Antonia White, um, who Virago, uh, published, and, uh, yeah, she's pop- Muriel Spark is another one.

They were kind of known.

So then, and once w- we established our careers and we were busy having kids and stuff, and then we, we kept this project going in the back of our minds.

Um, yes, then we had two wars, then we had all the liberation movements of the '60s and '70s.

Now, the Catholic women's novels actually go all the way through that period, so you can chart the, the shift from the modern to the postmodern novel.

There are some iconic women Catholic postmodern novelists, Alice Thomas Ellis, Muriel Spark, for instance.

They show us that transition, so we can walk with them through that change.

... talk about it over on the Discord.

Um, I guess in another, you know, upcoming read for me, I know you're not doing this project necessarily, but, um, the, the next book in my Muriel Spark read-a-thon is going to be, uh, one of my favorites of the past.

It's a reread of "The Driver's Seat."

Oh, cool.

We'll be entering the 1970s with Muriel Spark.

This is gonna be book 10 for October.

We, you know, one book every month, um, until we're done at 22 books.

That's what I try to reproduce in my own, this idea of a really complex, baffling story that beguiles you, but that also engages your brain as you try to figure out, almost as if you were a character in the novel, who can I trust? Who should I not trust? should I accept this mission or not? All these sort of questions should pop up in in the reader's head in the same way as it pops up in in Gabriel's head.

So it's so finding the spy on that Glenn Dayton's novels as well, Alan Furse, you know the great spy novels that we have in our literature which many of them have been written by literary novelists not People who just practice in the genre, you know, John Banville, Sebastian Foltz, Graham Greene, et cetera, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen.

It's a rich, rich tradition of literary novelists who have been drawn to this genre.

And I'm no exception.

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Muriel Spark once said to me that when she was younger, she carried three novels in her head that were queuing, waiting to be written.

Then as she got older, maybe there'd be one waiting to be written.

Was there anything like that with you? As I say, you had novels queuing up in your mind.

And then there's the literary layer.

Muriel Spark's novel from 1965, and Mil Habibi's short story from 1954, both circling the strangeness of the place.

The strangeness being what, exactly? That you could be a diplomat or a journalist and cross, and your neighbor couldn't.

that you'd hand your passport to a policeman who lived four streets from you and was standing on the other side of a barrier with a legionnaire next to him and a Belgian officer watching, and that this happened every day for 19 years with the same faces.

Have you read, um...

Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent?

I have not.

It's really great, but it's the only thing I know about the phenomenon that I, most of my close friends who are writers have had, which is you invent a character, and two weeks later you meet that person.

Welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close reading series from the London Review of Books.

I'm James Wood, and this month we're discussing Muriel Spark's brilliant, beautiful, compact novella, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961.

In all sorts of ways, it's a perfect book for our series.

It's also very personal.

Fabulous, um, details wh- which we're gonna get into in an, a minute.

And in the most basic sense, in the most basic realist sense, it offers a recognizable and veridical account of the world.

This is, as everyone acknowledges, Muriel Spark's autobiographical novel, um, about her own schooling in 1930s Edinburgh, and about an, a teacher who was, who was very important to her and her friends.

But it's weirdly close to the novel that I was just discussing a month ago with Patricia Lockwood, uh, Nabokov's Pnin, and not just because the whole of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published in The New Yorker, as were several chapters of Pnin.