Muriel Spark, the impossible experimenter: a celebration of James Bailey’s new book

A Bit Lit is on a two-week break until 16 June.

In our most recent film, Noreen Masud talks to James Bailey about his new book, Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. They discuss Spark’s brevity, polish and precision, ‘the impossibility of her novels’, the way Spark was able to write first drafts that were also finished versions.

We hear that ‘the experimental creates cracks into which we might creep’, Spark’s multimedia experiments enabling literary researchers to take similar risks in the forms and methods of their work.

James and Noreen tell us too about the two amazing archives Spark has left us, one filled with receipts, diaries and correspondence, the other with working manuscripts of mid-composition notes and research. Very different views of Spark emerge depending on which of these archives we see her from, and this is just one example of how James’ new book has reset the terms in which we might understand this vital and vitality-rich novelist.