The essence of the Bronts - Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark always regarded the Bronts with a novelist's eye. As Boyd Tonkin argues in his lively introduction, written for the new edition, the Bronts inspired Spark at the very beginning of her own career, but not in a straightforward way. Through her critical and biographical on the Bronts Spark identified not only their achievements but also their flaws and failings, and thereby began to define, as Tonkin puts it, 'her own best route'. As she herself said, in a piece recorded for the BBC at Emily Bront's grave in 1961, 'I was fascinated by [Emily's] creative mind because it's so entirely alien to my own'.

This book, first published in 1993, collects Spark's essays on the Bronts, her selection of their letters and of Emily's poetry. Evident throughout are Spark's critical intelligence, dry wit, and refusal to sentimentalise - qualities that gave her own novels their particular appeal. At the same time, The Essence of the Bronts is Muriel Spark's tribute to the sisters whose talents 'placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity'.

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, The Fanfarlo, in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) and The Finishing School (2004). Her short stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her Collected Poems appeared in 1967. Dame Muriel was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 1996 and awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in Italy on 13th April 2006, at the age of 88.
The National Library of Scotland holds the Muriel Spark archive: visit www.nls.uk/murielspark/ for more information.