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Muriel Spark and others
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The flowering of writing by women authors since the 1950s has produced
a very wide range of achievement. P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Margaret
Yorke, and Joan Smith have taken the crime novel to new heights of
psychological and social observation. Since Agatha Christie and Dorothy L.
Sayers (see page 399), it is remarkable that the most significant crime writers
have been women. What was considered by some to be an inferior genre
now stands with equal importance beside mainstream writing – such novels
as Innocent Blood (1980) and Devices and Desires (1989) by P.D. James, A
Small Deceit (1991) and Evidence to Destroy (1987) by Margaret Yorke, A
Dark-Adapted Eye (1986, under the pseudonym Barbara Vine), Live Flesh
(1986), and Talking to Strange Men (1987) by Ruth Rendell clearly rise
above the constraints of the genre. Their male counterparts, such as Julian
Symons, Colin Dexter and Reginald Hill, are similarly adept in their use of
crime plots to explore questions of human good and evil.
MURIEL SPARK AND OTHERS
The role of women as inferiors or outsiders in society has concerned many
writers. Muriel Spark’s female characters cover a wide range, from the
Edinburgh schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) to The
Abbess of Crewe (1974), a highly satirical fantasy on religious and political
themes, and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), a tragi-comedy set in 1945,
echoed in the more recent A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Many of
Spark’s works observe similar landscapes to Barbara Pym’s: the lonely
inhabitants of London’s bed-sitters, solitude and attempts at self-sufficiency
are recurring themes. Like Pym, she handles religion with comic acerbity.
‘Good morning, Mrs Hawkins.’ This was the Cypriot next door
cleaning his bicycle as I left for the office. ‘Good morning, Marky.’
That was the name he demanded to go by; he was decidedly
embarrassed when any of us made to call him Mr something. It was
to be a while before I found myself being addressed by my first
name. This certainly coincided with the time when I was moved to
lose my great weight. Then, I invited people to call me Nancy,
instead of Mrs Hawkins as I was to everyone in that summer of
1954, when I went to my office in the morning partly by bus and
partly across Green Park, whether it rained or whether it didn’t.