Muriel Spark: Time in her Fiction - Grand Format

Muriel Spark seems to have seen the world as a stage where all the men and women are merely players having their "moments" on the stage of life. "One's prime is the moment one was born for" she has been known to say, and it is those moments, mere spots in time, that she describes in her fiction. Old people become babes again. School-boys (or girls) grow into their prime. That is the cycle of life that can be traced throughout her work, a pattern of birth, growth, and decay that is akin to the seasons.
Through the analysis of these five finely chosen novels – Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, The Mandelbaum Gate and The Driver’s Seat – Linette Arthurton Bruno attempts to show how Muriel Spark adapts her time-structure to her theme. A great piece of work that underlines the skills of a woman considered as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.