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This volume of fourteen essays offers fresh insight into the life and work of Muriel Spark (1918–2006), one of Scotland’s most internationally celebrated writers. Known for her cultural cosmopolitanism and sharp wit, Spark was prolific as a novelist, poet, short story writer, dramatist, and literary critic. The Crooked Dividend provides a thorough overview of Spark’s multifaceted work and examines the cultural, literary, and personal frameworks that shaped her writing. These essays contextualise Spark within post-war British culture, analyse the influence of longstanding Scottish literary traditions on her work, and explore the full range of her literary output through topics such as gender, religion, and politics. In a comprehensive examination of her publications, archive material, and colourful career, this volume celebrates and reaffirms Spark’s international legacy.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Critical Concerns for Muriel Spark (Gerard Carruthers)

I: SPARK, BIOGRAPHY, AND FEMALE EXPERIENCE

1. ‘I knew what was what’: Correspondence and the Meta-Archival in the Muriel Spark Archive (Colin McIlroy)
2. Muriel Spark’s Waywardness (Carole Jones)
3. Spark’s Spinsters: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in the Novels of Muriel Spark (Susannah Thompson)
4. Between Desire and Control: The Fashioned Image in Muriel Spark’s Life and Fiction (Monica Germanà)
5. ‘Unfortunately you have left out all the love poems’: Spark in Love (Willy Maley and Dini Power)

II: WRITING MATERIALS

6. Muriel Spark and J. M. Barrie (Cairns Craig)
7. All the Abbess’s Nuns: Muriel Spark and the Idioms of Watergate (Colin Kidd)
8. ‘Making patterns with facts’: Unmaking History in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Catriona M. M. Macdonald)
9. Muriel Spark and the ‘Hired Grammarians’ (Helen Stoddart)
10. Already and Not Yet Written: Unfinished Acts of Writing in the Novels of Muriel Spark (Mark Currie)
11. Muriel Spark’s Windows and the Architecture of Surveillance (Amy Woodbury Tease)
12. Art and Industry Must Walk Hand in Hand: Muriel Spark and Twentieth-Century Design Ideology (Fiona Jardine)
13. The Publishing Scene in A Far Cry from Kensington (Ernest Schonfield)
14. Dramatic Contexts and Metatheatricality in Muriel Spark’s Writing for Performance (Ian Brown)

Notes on Contributors
Index