Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #119836
Cost: $1,800.00

Comforters

Muriel Spark

"ALL HAPPY GREETINGS FROM MURIEL": FIRST EDITION OF THE COMFORTERS, INSCRIBED BY MURIEL SPARK TO HER FRIENDS, NORTHERN IRISH POET ROBERT GREACEN AND HIS WIFE, AUTHOR AND CRITIC PATRICIA HUTCHINS

SPARK, Muriel. The Comforters. London: Macmillan, 1957. Octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket. $1800.

First edition of Spark's first novel, inscribed to her close friends, acclaimed Northern Irish poet Robert Greacen and his wife, writer and critic Patricia Hutchins: "Robert & Patricia—all happy greetings from Muriel."

"The Comforters was the first of the 22 novels Muriel Spark would write over nearly 50 years, the first of what would become her recognisable but inimitable oeuvre of slim, intelligent, irreverent, aesthetically sophisticated, sometimes Hitchcockianly grim, always philosophically powerful works of fiction… That this light, clever, mirthful tour de force was a first novel is astounding. It ends with its own genesis, neatly, like a good joke. As vibrant as ever, more than 50 years after its first appearance, it still knocks the stuffing out of the realist tradition, and probably always will" (The Guardian). Muriel Spark was close friends with the inscribees, Robert Greacen and Patricia Hutchins, who part of her literary social circle. Robert Greacen was a prominent (and widely published) Ulster poet. His wife, Patricia Hutchins was a critic who wrote several books including Ezra Pound's Kensington and James Joyce's Dublin. Muriel Spark helped Robert Greacen secure a commission to write a study of Noël Coward in 1953.

An about-fine inscribed copy.

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