The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Now read onīeryl Bainbridge Janice Galloway Angela Carter Graham Greene. InfluencesĪs a child Spark devoured Browning, Swinburne and Walter Scott's Border Ballads.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Ballad of Peckham Rye The Complete Short Stories. The critic Robert Nye called her 'brief, brittle and nasty' many more have found her concise, witty and refreshingly clear-eyed, with Carol Shields praising her 'economy and brilliance of style'. They anatomise such subjects as class, poverty, self-delusion and, most recently, creative jealousy (The Finishing School, 2004). Since then she has published 20-odd books: slim, deceptively light works given to dark crimes and tragic reversals related in an authorial voice of steely omniscience. Fame arrived with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), an archly disturbing portrait of a schoolteacher and her coterie of favoured pupils, which the New Yorker published in its entirety. Spark began her literary career in the 1950s as a poet and biographer (of Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë and John Masefield), but found her voice as a novelist and short-story writer. 'The Seraph and the Zambesi', based on her time in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), was chosen out of nearly 7,000 entries. She was spurred towards writing fiction after winning a short-story competition on the theme of Christmas in the Observer in 1951. After an unhappy marriage in Africa, she worked on 'various forms of subtle propaganda' for Foreign Office intelligence during the second world war, and brought new life to the Poetry Review in a stormy two-year editorship from 1947 to 1949. Other jobsĪs a young woman she taught English and worked as a secretary. |a Requires OverDrive Listen (file size: N/A KB) or OverDrive app (file size: 114507 KB).James Gillespie's School for Girls, Edinburgh (upon which the Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was modelled, and where Spark came under the spell of a charismatic teacher) Heriot-Watt College, Edinburgh, where she did a course in precis-writing. This is Dame Muriel Spark at her most devilishly piquant. In fact, this Music Man of the thoroughly modern corporation changes the lives of all the eccentric characters he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to V.R. Douglas Dougal) to do 'human research' into the private lives of its workforce, they are in no way prepared for the mayhem, mutiny, and murder he will stir up. When the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley hires Dougal Douglas (a.k.a.

|a The Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical fable of a blue-collar town turned upside down. |a 1 online resource (5 audio files) : |b digital |a Ashland : |b Blackstone Audio, Inc., and Buck 50 Productions, LLC, |c 2009.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark