Book review: Muriel Spark, the biography

The progress or otherwise of Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark has provided enjoyable gossip for many years," said John Carey in the Sunday Times. There were rumours that Spark was "very upset" with it, and had gone through line by line "to make it a little bit fairer" - even that she had forbidden publication altogether. But the book, commissioned in 1992, has now finally appeared. Stannard's "triumph" is to have produced an account that survived her scrutiny, and does justice to her vitality and her talent as a writer - yet unmistakably reveals her egotism and ruthlessness. After her death in 2006, for instance, it emerged that she had disinherited her son Robin, whom she had abandoned as a child. ("He's never done anything for me," she once said, "except for being one big bore.")

The first half of her life "would be a gift to any biographer", said Mark Bostridge in the Observer, and "Stannard makes the most of it". Spark (above) was born in 1918 to a working-class Jewish family in Edinburgh, who scrimped and saved to send her to a private school, Gillespie's (her teacher was Christina Kay, the model for Jean Brodie, who referred to her girls as la creme de la creme, admired Mussolini and taught by "dazzling non-sequiturs"). Aged 19, and eager for adventure, Muriel married an older teacher, Sydney Spark, and went with him to Rhodesia. He turned out to be violently unstable; she left him and her baby son, returning on a troopship to London in 1944. Spark worked in propaganda during the war, then scraped together a living as a poet and literary critic, while engaging in passionate, messy affairs with two poets, Derek Stanford and Howard Sergeant. In 1954, she had a break-down (she believed that TS Eliot was spying on her, disguised as a window cleaner) after which she converted to Catholicism, and renounced love in favour of art.

Spark "had a string of triumphs in the late Fifties and early Sixties", said Jonathan Bate in the Sunday Telegraph: "Memento Mori, at once a hilarious farce and one of English literature's most moving portraits of old age; The Ballad of Peckham Rye, a Waugh-like black comedy; and of course The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". Her triumphs brought prestige and money: she moved to New York and then Italy, where she eventually settled with her "loyal companion", Penelope Jardine. "Stannard is a gifted biographer with a fine turn of phrase," said Bryan Cheyette in the Independent. "There are a few blind spots – Robin refused to co-operate – but this account will not be surpassed."

Muriel Spark by Martin Stannard, Weidenfeld, 654pp,£25. The Week Bookshop £22.50 (including p&p)