The Public Image, Muriel Spark. Knopf, 1968. First US edition.
Vintage hardcover with dust jacket, unclipped. Some light shelfwear to jacket. Taupe boards are clean, binding is tight. No markings inside. Very good condition.
"Like many women artists, Muriel Spark found her voice comparatively late in a hitherto difficult life. She was 39, a struggling single mother and recently recovered from a serious breakdown when the first of her more than 20 novels, The Comforters, was published in 1957. Fortunately for her and her readers, this voice arrived fully fledged, and proved to be remarkably reliable. Between the late 1950s and the middle 1970s, Spark published pretty well a novel a year, plus dozens of short stories, plays and essays. And, of course, in 1961 she published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her legendary tale of the Edinburgh spinster schoolteacher who devotes her middle years to her "gerrils", to Mussolini and to having illicit sex. The success of Miss Jean Brodie, in its Broadway, film and television versions, assured her financial security for life, and a place in the most hallowed annals of Scottish and English literature. She became a dame in 1993." (Jenny Turner, The Guardian, 2006)