Muriel Spark and the House of the Brontës: Female Authorship and Autonomy

Abstract: Muriel Spark was obsessed with the Brontë sisters, their house, their literary careers and their afterlives. Although critics have commented on the relationship between Spark’s critical and biographical studies of the Brontës and her own emerging writing practice, few have compared them in depth. This essay classifies Spark, the Brontës, and their female characters as mythmakers, governesses, and tigresses, exploring female authorship and autonomy in the nineteenth and twentieth century and beyond. Spark engages with and imitates the Brontës’ ways of establishing their literary career and fame, but she assumes a critical distance from the Brontës’ solipsism and their self-mythologising process. Spark also moves beyond the Brontës’ scope and discusses women’s claims for their own agency in an increasingly globalised and mediatised consumerist society.