Reaching for broader horizons

Bright sparks, fungi feasts and a countryman's tale through the seasons

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Electric Spark

The Scots-born author Dame Muriel Spark is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the filmed and televised novel of a teacher in an Edinburgh private girls' school. Based on Spark's own teaching experiences, it captures the Calvinistic basque of an open-minded schoolmistress and the thrall in which she is held by her chosen pupils.

Its appeal lies in its exploration of repression and sexual longing - a reaching, both emotionally and geographically, for broader horizons. Biographer Frances Wilson has found Spark's own broader horizons, from a disastrous marriage in Rhodesia to the abandonment on her death of her only son.

Prolific and something of a poet in prose, Spark makes frequent pronouncements (to be found in the voluminous archive she left behind) that often don’t ring true. ‘Truth by itself is neutral.’ Truth is never neutral. ‘Lies are like fleas.’ No, lies are often other people's truths.

Spark is to some warm and witty, to others a monstrous madam. In both, Wilson has done her superb justice.

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