Spark’s Spinsters: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in the Novels of Muriel Spark

Thompson, Susannah (2022) Spark’s Spinsters: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in the Novels of Muriel Spark. In: The Crooked Dividend: Essays on Muriel Spark. Occasional Papers (24). Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Glasgow, pp. 44-62. ISBN 9781908980335 (paperback); 9781908980342 (ebook)

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Abstract

Muriel Spark’s novels of the early 1960s teem with ‘old maids of settled character’, ‘intellectually glamorous’ women who share the ‘graceful attributes of a common poverty’ (The Girls of Slender Means). Spark’s spinsters live lives out of synch with conventional family structures, offering the reader a portrait of female experience unbound by ‘significant others’. Far from the stereotype of the vulnerable, pitiable or desperate childless single woman (aka ‘the dried up spinster’), and unlike her callow, amoral bachelors and widowers (The Bachelors, The Ballad of Peckham Rye), Spark’s female lodgers and landladies are frequently independent, idiosyncratic and resourceful, with rich, complex inner lives. Yet in spite of their recurrence in twentieth century and contemporary fiction, these exemplars of women’s experience ‘beyond the family’, and the specificities of their circumstances, have been frequently overlooked in recent scholarship. This chapter seeks to examine and reclaim the domestic lives of middle-aged or elderly single women living in rented accommodation through an examination of the quotidian and everyday experience of characters such as Collie, Greggie and Jamie in Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington’s Mrs Hawkins, and similarly charismatic, complex characters in the novels of writers including Patrick Hamilton (The Slaves of Solitude), Barbara Pym (Quartet in Autumn) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes). Not least, it considers Spark’s own experience of lodging-house living in Curriculum Vitae and other essays.