The Essence of the Brontes

First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark’s writings on the Brontë sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems. Perceptively but unsentimentally, Spark considers the Brontës’ lives and works, including their generally disastrous attempts at teaching, and reflects on her own fascination, as a writer and a reader, with Emily Brontë and with “the immortal Wuthering Heights and its nightmare hero.” This edition features a new foreword by Boyd Tonkin, the literary editor at the Independent.

Author Biography

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.