The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)

by Muriel Spark (Author)
Key Phrases: brodie girls, lavatory window, dormitory girls, Miss Brodie, Anne Marie, Auntie Pet (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
“Muriel Spark is one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine…We are never out of touch in a Spark novel with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of magic and wit, the cunning tautness of suspense.”–John Updike, The New Yorker

“One of our greatest living novelists.” –The Times

“Spark’s powers of invention are apparently inexhaustible.” –Commonwealth

“[Spark is] one of this century’s finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment.” –New York Times

“Some of [Spark’s] finest fictions are novellas rather than novels, short enough to be read in a single dizzying sitting.” –David Lodge

“[Spark] has written some things that seem likely to go on being read as long as fiction in English is read at all.” –New York Times Book Review

Product Description
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The brevity of Muriel Spark’s novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.

Spark’s most celebrated novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher’s catastrophic effect on her pupils. The Girls of Slender Means is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. The Driver’s Seat follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And The Only Problem is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.

All four novels give evidence of one of the most original and unmistakable voices in contemporary fiction. Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Everyman's Library (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042062
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042067
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #113,025 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary and chilling, April 23, 2008

By	Robert B. Rossney (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is, as Tom Farber said of Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, satire written with a scalpel. It's precise and sharp, and you also get the feeling things are being laid open and cut away. At times she is as cruel and cold (consider Mary, for instance, whose stupidity is described with disdain even as she is dying horrifically). You have to have a certain amount of tolerance for an author who just isn't very nice.

This is a novel of exceptional complexity that reads like a simple little story of a bygone time. It's worth reading again and again.

And The Girls of Slender Means is, if anything, even better. In it's construction it's a little like one of the locked-room mysteries that Agatha Christie wrote, only it's about something much more upsetting than some vicar getting kacked in the rectory.

Ian McEwan would give his front teeth to be able to write novels like these.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incantatory tragedy, September 4, 2008

By	Alex Knisely (London, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Greek poetry used epithets to pad out line metre, I remember being taught. Spark uses them to mark character. Small-eyed Sandy; stupid Mary; over and over the words are thrown up to the reader, at the oddest and least expected times. Those words inhere in Mary and Sandy, one feels. Even on a happy day, in a garden full of light, the stupidity, the pig-eyed squint. They cannot escape, even among the flowers, being what they are. The non-sequence of narration, too, makes inevitability clear: Along the gravel paths in the happy sun, the sordid death ten years later. Greek, that; Greek the foredoom, Greek the hubris and the seeing through that same hubris, through the illusion that Miss Jean Brodie ever had a prime. A novel about Fate, then, and a magnificent one.