Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey (review)

Reviewed by: Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey Robert E. Hosmer James Bailey. Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. Edinburgh UP, 2021. 224 pp. Muriel Spark died in April 2006. She was eighty-eight years old. She left an immense literary legacy. Death notices acclaimed her one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, most often singling out her 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for special praise. Published in nearly complete form in a single issue of The New Yorker, it became a best-seller; later adaptations for stage, film, and television have done more than keep Spark and her famous fictional teacher alive. Unfortunately, these adaptations have also diverted attention from the rest of the Edinburgh-born writer's oeuvre: twenty-two novels, dozens of short stories, four volumes of poetry, several plays and biographies, scholarly editions of letters, and scores of essays. It is an astonishing output for someone whose literary career really only began at the age of thirty-nine with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters (1957), and spanned six decades, ending with The Finishing School (2004). Unlike the work of so many authors, Spark's writing, to judge from James Bailey's extensive bibliography in Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form, has not faded into obscurity in the fifteen years since her death. Her writing remains the subject of analysis and commentary. That may be due to the continuing afterlife of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or to Martin Stannard's End Page 180 Muriel Spark: The Biography (2009). Whatever the case, Spark's work remains the subject of serious critical study: at least five major collections of critical essays have appeared in the last twenty years. All of these are collections of discrete critical essays rather than extended, integrated studies of the writer's fiction. Now, with Bailey's Muriel Spark's Early Fiction, we have a carefully-focused and meticulously-researched scholarly examination, beginning with some of the early short stories and including novels from the period bracketed by The Comforters and The Hothouse by the East River (1973). Bailey would release Spark and her early fiction from the narrow critical categories to which she and her work have too often been confined. His objective is to let her writing be seen in new ways, appreciated as radically, if not uniquely, experimental, and prepared for further examination. In this endeavor, Bailey has succeeded in good measure and Muriel Spark's Early Fiction is both a homage to Spark and gift to contemporary readers and scholars. Bailey succeeds by using several strategies: close reading (can we still use the phrase?) of texts; mastery of earlier critical commentary on Spark's work; and the integration of painstaking archival research on manuscripts and materials into original and thought-provoking discussion. His arguments are clear, logical, and forceful, and because they are always supported, the reader who might disagree with a particular case study can easily make a counterargument. For the purpose of his argument Bailey has limited his discussion to selected primary texts: seven novels, five short stories, and one stage play. Muriel Spark's Early Fiction follows a scheme of thematic organization. In chapter 1, "'Author's Ghosts': Manifestations of the Supernatural in Spark's Early Fiction," Bailey focuses on two concerns: the first he calls "textual haunting" (35), whereby seeing a ghost, or seeing as a ghost, drastically alters perspective and radicalizes perception of plot, character, and agency. Bailey uses several of Spark's early stories, among them "Harper and Wilton" (1953) and "The Portobello Road" (1958), as well as her first novel, The Comforters, to make his case. He demonstrates that "the twinned themes of ghostly haunting and ontological disruption" (37), rather than being a later development in Spark's fiction as has often been thought, are present from the outset. Most effective, perhaps, is his use of Spark's revised version of "Harper and Wilton" (1996), which illuminates the extent to which she incorporated subversive revisions into the earlier version. Second and not quite so convincing is Bailey...