Muriel Spark, In The Long Run

“I'm often very deadpan, but there's a moral statement too, and what it's saying is that there's a life beyond this, and these events are not the most important things. They're not important in the long run.”

One learns today that Miss Spark has passed into that long run ... that so many writers prepare for, I suspect, their entire writing lives. Dealing with life, with the astonishing fact that one is alive, and what that might mean, and just as evenhandedly—for all good writers are evenhanded—with the worse astonishment that all this will be over. Any day now, if not minute.

“Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenuous, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means”.

Opening line, The Girls of Slender Means. One is immediately drawn in, all over again. People will be thinking of Miss Jean Brodie today, but here, in her next book, Spark captured what it is to be young and with your friends. Granted, with an unexploded bomb in their post-war English garden, but what woman can't identify with that.

Carol Shields: “Their slenderness lies not so much in their means as in their half-perceived notions about what their lives will become and their overestimation of their power in the world.”

This line made me, an old girl, shiver today. For what I had been, for what I thought I would become. For the bomb I never dreamt of, for the fact it has long since come and gone.

Perhaps our childhood, as girls, might be gauged by the lasting appeal of these two of Miss Sparks most memorable books: those with too much mothering, still dreaming of cure, finding lovely schadenfreude in Jean Brodie's fall. And those of us lacking any guidance at all, still The Girls, funny, reckless, hard as nails when called for, still living heedless of the death to come.