Painting a portrait of a gothic icon, this biography recounts Mary Shelley's dramatic life, from her youth and turbulent marriage to her career as writer and editor. At the age of 20, Mary Shelley secured her place in history by writing Frankenstein, now acknowledged as one of the great literary classics. The daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley led an unconventional life, which is depicted—with previously unpubli...

Two stars team up—Muriel Spark and Edward Gorey—to bring the charming tale of Ticky the clock to life in this children’s classic.Once there was a very fine clock named Ticky, who lived with Professor Horace John Morris and kept perfect time. Each night, at fourteen minutes past ten, his time was used to set the rest of the clocks in the house. When the professor’s friends suggest that Ticky be made a professor, too, he explains what really happens during the quiet ...

"A perfect book"—the film version won Maggie Smith an Academy award—about a controversial teacher and her female students in the years before World War II ( Chicago Tribune)."Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!"So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn't stop with just ...

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 fo...

In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.' Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability to rise to the different c...

The essays, reviews, memoirs, and other writings collected here for the first time conjure up one of the great critical imaginations of our time. The Golden Fleece, which takes its title from Spark's first published essay, has four sections—Art & Poetry; Autobiography & Travel; Literature; and Religion, Politics & Philosophy—forming a kind of oblique autobiography, an evolving confession of a powerful individual faith in the human and what transcends it.

For Barbara Vaughn, a checkpoint between Jordan and the newly formed Israel is the threshold to painful self-discoveryBarbara Vaughn is a scholarly woman whose fascination with religion stems partly from a conversion to Catholicism, and partly from her own half-Jewish background. When her boyfriend joins an archaeological excursion to search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls, Vaughn takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. But this is 1960, and with the nation...

The only play by famed Scottish author Muriel Spark takes on the dilemmas of two intellectually ambitious women in 1960s EnglandIn a home overlooking London's Regent's Canal in the 1960s, two scholars debate the choices they have made with their lives. Catherine Delfont was one of the most promising minds of her generation, but after earning her PhD she gave up her research to marry a well-regarded economist and raise a family. Her cousin Leonora stayed in academia...

A wealthy academic's life shatters when his estranged wife becomes the suspected leader of a terrorist organizationHaving led a successful, comfortable life, Harvey Gotham retires to the French countryside to pursue bookish obsessions—namely, a long monograph on the Book of Job, the biblical narrative of faith in the face of extraordinary suffering. But Gotham's intellectual interests soon bleed into his daily life when a series of misfortunes, from a destructive a...

Touched by madness and haunted by a secret past, Paul and Elsa's relationship reveals that there can be no normality for people who witnessed the worst of warIn 1970s New York, Paul and Elsa are like many other well-off middle-aged couples, worrying over their apartment and psychoanalyst bills by day, and meeting friends at restaurants by night. But this is not an ordinary couple with ordinary neuroses, as becomes clear when Paul convinces himself that Elsa's shado...

A witty, romantic farce from the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: "Beautifully put together and effortlessly entertaining" ( The New York Times).Robert wants nothing more than to become a serious art historian. But his hopes for a staid academic life are put on hold when he's driven from London to Venice to escape one lover and seek out another: the enigmatic Bulgarian refugee Lina Pancev. In Venice, Robert encounters a grand carnival of l...

" Sleek and suggestive . . . [ Reality and Dreams] is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you've accepted a world gone utterly awry." — Kirkus ReviewsBritish film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not—and with no idea who to trust. Soon hi...