Jenny Turner on Muriel Spark

Jenny Turner on Muriel Spark:

One of Spark's disqualifications from "greatness" is her lack of interest in families - was there ever a "great" novelist who could manage without this mighty social and fictional institution? Did Spark ever write with conviction about even one? When you think about it, you realise it is exactly the way the novels swerve round family, child-bearing, romantic love and so on that lends them their delightful perversity, their very sense of self.