RIP Muriel Spark

It is with great regret that I announce the passing of Muriel Spark. Beyond being Scotland's answer to Jane Austen, Dame Spark was best known for what is considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A winner of countless awards, and the writer of a stunning body of literature, the author passed away at the age of 88.

To learn more about Muriel Spark, google her here.

I wrote a well received essay about Spark's most famous work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie this year for a literature class at the University of Toronto. It deals with her skilled use of time-shifting. I have included the opening paragraph here:

Time is traditionally considered linear in its construction. There is a past, present, and future. Within the confines of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, time is treated as all encompassing; it swathes the narrative in a fixture of the circular, allowing the narration to describe events from no fixed vantage point. The omniscience of the narrator’s voice does not follow the traditional route of exploring events as they happen, but instead opts to seamlessly offer facts from the future, as the present/past is rendered through equal description. In effect, the narrator ‘gives away’ events which are to occur ‘in the future’. One may be tempted to assert that the novel’s embodiment of predestination can be attributed to the author’s religious background, but the complex narrative exploitation of time is a credit to her skills as an author. By jumping across an unrestrained timeline, Spark alters the reader’s perceptions of various characters. She also reveals the opinions characters will harbour for one another later in their lives. By not limiting itself to one distinct timeframe, the narration adds a sense of mimetic realism which would have otherwise not existed. Spark manipulates the reader just as much as she manipulates time, allowing a confluence of deliberate construction to aid in elevating the text from a typical school story to that of a shrewdly crafted novel.

Goodbye Dame Muriel Spark - and thank you.