PLANS OF NOVELIST

Press, Volume C, Issue 29515, 17 May 1961, Page 2

PLANS OF NOVELIST

Miss Spark To Write Play

When Muriel Spark was recovering from a serious illness some friends suggested: “Why don’t you pass the time by writing a novel?” She wrote a novel. “The Comforters.” which she so enjoyed doing and which I was so well received that; she wrote another—and another. This month, her fifth j novel tn three years. “Thei Bachelors.” is out and is collecting rave notices in the’ international literary reviews. She has been compared; for her comic qualities to Evelyn Waugh. Others have described her as a kind of welfare state Jane Austen, in whose hands the commonplace becomes mysteriously implausible. Muriel Sarah Spark was born 43 years ago in Edinburgh. She is partly Jewish and, in 1954. became a Catholic. She married at 18 and has an adult son. London Jobs After a spell in Southern Rhodesia, she did a series of jobs in London as a short-hand-typist while trying to write. By 1951, she was known as a little-magazine poet and the author of rather stodgy books on Emily Bronte. Mary Shelley and John Masefield. She lived in Clerkenwell. London, to save money. Now she is successful, she still lives there alone in a small fiat. South London provided the setting for her novel "The Ballad of Peckham Rye.” published earlier this year. Small, with huge blue eyes, a childlike smile, and fair fluffy hair, she loves clothes. She is immensely energetic and writes very fast, never taking longer than eight weeks over a book. Is she planning more novels? Certainly. “I have five novels waiting to be written,” she says, "and a play.”