Slender Means Research Articles

Centenary Paper: Juan Lorenzo Palmireno and the Practical Application of Humanistic Study

In the sixteenth century in Valencia, Spain, Juan Lorenzo Palmireno wrote self-help manuals aimed at the ‘literate country lad of slender means and few connections who plans to better his lot by moving to the city’, in the words of Richard Preto-Rodas. In Estudioso de aldea (1571) and its sequel El estudioso cortesano (1573), Palmireno guides his rustic reader in the art of self-fashioning and the presentation of a polished image, in speaking well to prosper in his urban milieu. The success of his books provides a historical, real-life connection to the struggles of many literary characters of the period, including Sancho Panza’s social-climbing ambitions, pícaros and pseudo-pícaros, courtiers and would-be courtiers. Today, the pragmatic objective to articulate clearly and project an image of culture, sophistication and clear thinking dovetails with students’ aims with their university education. At a time of crisis in the humanities, with student debt making US academia increasingly vocational, convincing students of the importance of studying Early Modern Spanish literature can be challenging. Palmireno’s manuals are immediately relatable given the parallels to students’ educational goals and views on the purpose of a liberal arts education, and they give historical context to the ‘great works’ of Golden Age Spanish literature.

Beyond trauma: provisional networks and eccentric forms in fiction of the blitz

ABSTRACT In many novels set in London during and after the Blitz, such as The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, Caught by Henry Green, Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark, and Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, traumatic experiences are often subordinated to concerns that have received comparatively little critical attention. This article argues that a strain of Blitz fiction is primarily engaged in the mapping of ad hoc social networks that emerged during the Blitz. Mass evacuation, destroyed homes, and shifting wartime posts resulted in provisional domestic arrangements, micropolitical tensions, and networks of care that abruptly emerged and disappeared. The fictional representation of these unusual social structures demanded unconventional narrative techniques. A strain of Blitz fiction adopted the formal structures of network narratives in order to render distributed, dynamic, and dislocated social topographies. This article moves beyond the well-established association of wartime literature with representations of trauma in order to bring into focus a strain of network narratives that reflect a cultural logic of contingency under the Blitz.

Женское лицо войны в прозе современных британских писательниц

The contribution of British women to the victory in World War II was great: unmarried women under 30 were mobilized to Women’s Auxiliary Service, to work in industries and in the so-called Land Army. During the Blitz –a period of intense bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–1941–women worked in voluntary teamsclearing rubble, in ambulances and in hospitals. Descriptions of the bombed, burning city are numerous in the books of writers who witnessed the war (G.Greene, E.Bowen, and others). The war changed the everyday life of British women and their social roles drastically. The life of women in the wartime London is described in M. Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means(1963), but in subsequent years the topic was not much discussed in literature. The return of British literature to national history took place at the end of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the wartime women’s life and fight is reflected in the following novels by contemporary women writers: S.Waters The Night Watch, K.Atkinson Life after Life, E.Healey Elizabeth is Missing, K.Morton The Secret Keeper, and others. All the novels are based both on wartime documents (witnesses’ diaries and memoirs) and on literary tradition. Each of the writers describes the heroic struggle of women during the Blitz and their everyday life; wartime daily life and its constituents acquire a symbolic, even ideological meaning. The novels analyze similar themes and problems, but the writers use different points of view and narrative techniques. S. Waters uses reverse com-position, her characters are marginal from the point of view of public morals. K.Atkinson’s novel is a com-plex postmodern narration where numerous plotlines are interwoven. E.Healey mostly relies on memory games, while K.Morton uses popular literature techniques. Two categories –memory and history –are em-ployed in all the novels to show and to reconstruct the role of British women in the WWII victory.

Authors of Slender Means? Female Authorship in Mid-Twentieth-Century British Fiction

Abstract This article examines women writers as characters in British novels and stories by women writers from the 1940s to the early 1960s. In works by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Renault, and others, there is a reflection on the social and artistic positions available to female authors. Given the gender segregation of the literary field at mid-century, in which ‘womanly’ writing was associated with the commercial form of romance and ‘manly’ writing with seriousness, the predicament of female authorship is rarely explored in fiction. But when it is, fictional women authors point up the constraints and limits of a ‘feminine’ literary aesthetic in illuminating ways. The article reconstructs how mid-twentieth-century British women authors thought about the act of writing, how they viewed the fields of literary creation and production, and which narrative strategies they used to negotiate this difficult terrain.

Perforated Narrative Space in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

Perforated Narrative Space in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

A light and heartless hand

ABSTRACTAn essay on Spark, on writing. ‘A light and heartless hand’ considers writerly characters in Muriel Spark’s novels including The Finishing School, Loitering With Intent, The Girls of Slender Means and A Far Cry from Kensington, as well as Spark’s own advice for aspiring novelists.

A Room Away from the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma

Reviewed by: A Room Away from the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma Deborah Stevenson, Editor Suma, Nova Ren A Room Away from the Wolves. Algonquin, 2018 [336p] ISBN 978-1-61620-373-3 $18.95 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 8-12 Bina is supposed to be going into exile (well, being taken in by friends) to give her warring family (really her bullying stepsisters) a breather, but instead Bina makes a break for it, heading to Manhattan. There she seeks out and finds Catherine House, the old-fashioned boarding house her mother stayed at in her youth, and she's welcomed as a legacy and given a tiny room. She's thrilled at this connection with the mother she loved, the mother who had possibilities beyond merely acceding to the man in her life, and she enjoys her budding friendship with willful fellow resident Monet. Catherine House is strange, though, in ways that Bina finds increasingly disturbing: the frantic devotion of the other young women there to the house's benefactress, Catherine de Barra, and the legends around her death; the opal ring that belonged to Bina's mother and now seems connected to Catherine; and the seeming inability of its inhabitants to leave. This is Muriel Spark's great boarding-house novel The Girls of Slender Means turned to creepy gothic, and turned to it very well indeed. Suma's writing is taut, potent, and enticing as she establishes Bina's vulnerability and crafts the oppressive, plush, and enigmatic world of Catherine House. As with her previous books, however, the situation is a stage for girls in liminal or marginalized states to play out their emotional transitions, so Bina's family drama and her mother's painful distancing are a keen and anxious harmonic line. The book's structure, with an opening scene set after Bina has been at Catherine House for a month, primes readers to be alert to strangeness but leaves twists in store for them, and there's plenty of room for discussion afterward about the implications. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Discipline and Slenderness: Docile Bodies in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

Muriel Spark’s 1963 novel The Girls of Slender Means (hereafter Girls) portrays the May of Teck Club in London’s Kensington, an establishment that “exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social p...

Call and Answer: Muriel Spark and Media Culture

“Call and Answer: Muriel Spark and Media Culture” reads the telephone in Muriel Spark’s postwar novels Memento Mori (1959) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963) as an antagonistic medium that exposes a pervasive anxiety about communication and surveillance. The essay argues that reading Spark’s postwar novels through the lens of contemporary media culture gives us new purchase on her as a writer informed by machine age modernism, whose preoccupation with media demands that we also consider how her particular historical moment breeds a culture of surveillance that we are inextricably tethered to today.

“Nowhere’s Safe”: Ruinous Reconstruction in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

This essay reads Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means as critiquing the mythology of Britain’s Second World War, especially the romanticization of the postwar welfare state. Refusing to find meaning in the ruins of war, Girls repudiates the reparative logic of reconstruction, and its transformation of wartime injury into an occasion for redemption. The essay also situates Spark in a longer trajectory of wartime writing, revealing her innovative social form. Employing a comparative postwar approach, it uses the work of Virginia Woolf to expose Spark’s destruction of modernist narrative architecture, showing its brand of individual sympathy to be inaccessible in the postwar period. The essay then turns to Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love, a direct rewriting of Girls, which re-enchants welfare’s social potential in the face of its Thatcherite demolition.

Muriel Spark: the biography

Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark became the epitome of literary chic and one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, recorded her early years but politely blurred her darker moments: troubled relations with her family, a terrifying period of hallucinations, and disastrous affairs with the men she loved. At the age of nineteen, Spark left Scotland to get married in southern Rhodesia, only to divorce and escape back to Britain in 1944. Her son returned in 1945 and was brought up by Spark's parents while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After converting to Catholicism in 1954, she began writing novels that propelled her into the literary stratosphere. These came to include Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry from Kensington. With The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), later adapted into a successful play and film, Spark became an international celebrity and began to live half her life in New York City. John Updike, Tennessee Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene applauded her work. She had an office at The New Yorker and became friends with Shirley Hazzard and W. H. Auden. Spark ultimately settled in Italy, where for more than thirty years-until her death in 2006-she shared a house with the artist Penelope Jardine. Spark gave Martin Stannard full access to her papers. He interviewed her many times as well as her colleagues, friends, and family members. The result is an indelible portrait of one of the most significant and emotionally complicated writers of the twentieth century. Stannard presents Spark as a woman of strong feeling, sharp wit, and unabashed ambition, determined to devote her life to her art. Muriel Spark promises to become the definitive biography of a literary icon.

The May of Teck Club

Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourthor fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new artform, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind's eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit. There was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene, it would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon or some event of the earth outside everybody's scope. People continued to exchange assurances of depressed feelings about the weather or the news, or the Albert Memorial which had not been hit, not even shaken, by any bomb from first to last. The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in one of a row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; some bombs had dropped nearby, and in a few back gardens, leaving the buildings cracked on the outside and shakily hinged within, but habitable for the time being. The shattered windows had been replaced with new glass rattling in loose frames. More recently, the bituminous black-out paint had been removed from landing and bathroom windows. Windows were important in that year of final reckoning; they told at a glance whether a house was inhabited or not; and in the course of the past years they had accumulated much meaning, having been the main dangerzone between domestic life and the war going on outside: everyone had said, when the sirens sounded, 'Mind the windows. Keep away from the windows. Watch out for the glass.' To reread The Girls of Slender Means in 2003 is to appreciate the economy and brilliance of Spark's style. This was an innovative book in 1963 not that I knew that then and it still, today, flashes its own disguising Schiaparelli dress, with the beauty of youth pressed close against youth's bewilderment. Innocence is abruptly overturned in these pages, but Spark has structured her novel so that we realise we are about to be

Spatial Free Plastic Forming of Slender Parts—Machine Design, Forming Limits, and Application

Free plastic forming of a slender part means that an initially straight bar, clamped at its both ends, is bent and twisted by an appropriate motion of the end supports only. Emphasis is attached on the computer controlled, precise forming of workpieces with prescribed shape. In this paper the design of an appropriate forming machine at the laboratory scale will be presented. Moreover, the forming limits due to replastification of already completed sections of the part will be illustrated geometrically using one or two “cylinders of admissibility.” Finally, the method will be demonstrated by means of actually formed parts.

From Student to Composer: The Chamber Works

In the files of the Royal College of Music is a report on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's studies under Walter Parratt during the young man's first eighteen months at the school. This had witnessed slide from fair at the end of the Easter semester, 1891, through in July to irregular by the end of December 1891. Sir George Grove, who had presided over college affairs for ten years, commented, Why this irregularity at the Music Class? Please let me never have to complain again. The rest is very gratifying (quoted in Royal College of Music Annual Reports 1891). For the Easter term ending on April 2, 1892, the composer received the comment bad, and he dropped the class from that point on. The young student must have been bored; he needed no such instruction. Coleridge-Taylor's harmony class proved the antithesis of this experience, with tutor Charles Wood commenting that his work has been in every respect excellent (quoted in Royal College of Music Annual Reports 1892). Yet Coleridge relinquished this class too, confirming that he did not need much training in harmony either. Coleridge-Taylor had entered the college in the fall of 1890 as a student of the violin, but after two years, and just weeks after seventeenth birthday, he started studying composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and replaced violin studies with the piano. Six months later, in March 1893, he was awarded an open scholarship to study composition. By the standards of both time and place, this shift was remarkable, especially seen in the experience of Coleridge-Taylor's college colleague, Ralph Vaughan Williams, born in 1872 and a student at the college after studying history at Cambridge University. Vaughan Williams' compositions were eventually to attract an international reputation, yet Stanford insisted that Vaughan Williams study the harmony course until he passed Grade 5 (that period lasted two terms) before he would take him for composition (Vaughan Williams 1963, 181). In comparison, Coleridge-Taylor's musical abilities were in evidence from the first months at Grove's institution. The young Coleridge-Taylor developed rapidly as a composer, showing remarkable assurance and craftmanship. His student works form a well-defined chapter of output. During the four years that he studied under Stanford, he produced at least eleven chamber works for various combinations of instruments. From 1897 when he left Prince Consort Road to death in 1912, he produced four more works in this genre. This sharp decrease is no doubt due to the absence of a commercial market for chamber music in Britain at this time. Of four professional works, three were written for violin and piano (Four African Dances, op. 58, 1904; Romance, op. 59, no. 2, 1904; and the Ballade in C minor, op. 73, 1907), and the fourth was for cello and piano (Variations in B minor, 1907). Stanford actively advocated the educative and formative reasons for writing chamber music, a genre that had been recently enriched by the appearance of chamber works by Brahms and Dvorak, such as the latter's Piano Quintet in A, op. 81 (1887), and the former's Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115 (1891), and Clarinet Sonata, op. 120 (1894). Stanford's own compositions included a piano quintet (1886) and two string quintets. He believed in the vital concepts of Brahmsian intellectualism and which exists by virtue of its own sound alone, which we term 'absolute music' (quoted in Stanford and Forsyth 1916, 232). Chamber music employs slender means, but having fewer forces with which to work does not necessarily mean that it is easier to write. The two students who passed Stanford's ultimate test were Coleridge-Taylor and William Hurlstone, who were seen as the professor's favorites. Hurlstone, Coleridge-Taylor's friend and fellow student, was awarded the first Cobbett Prize in 1906 for Phantasy Quartet in A minor, in 1906 (Hurlstone 1947, 24). …

Wide horizons, slender means: the scope for British influence

James Morgan believes the other major powers are all facing challenges which offer unusual opportunities for Britain. The developing world is evolving in a manner that is peculiarly favourable to British interests. By refusing to make a full commitment to the Maastricht Treaty Britain is faced with a complex dilemma. It has lost influence in the coming debate on implementation, thereby permitting others a free hand to deploy whatever methods are needed to fabricate what will be presented as a full realization of the aims of Economic and Monetary Union, and which will be damaging to this country's interests.

Ordinary Messengers by Michael Hannon, and: The Raven Wakes Me Up by Stephan Torre

Reviews 277 but in ways at once more personal and more historical. Wallis has a stronger bent for the rhyme traditional to cowboy poetry though she uses free verse more frequently. Her poetry of cattle culture tends toward narrative, and at times, as her book’s title suggests, it translates western experience into Nordic myth—see her “Invocation”of Odin on his “oct-shod bronc”or “War Horse,”where “In my dreams I ride war horses/Deep bay Belgians big with dignity” (that second line my favorite in the book).Though the speaker of “Invocation”may “much prefer a/Fighting God” to a “wimpy, singing Muse,”the poet can take much care with small details of song (like the alliteration of “Beneath the burden/O f carried coffins”in “Where Old Ones Die”).Wallis also attends to women’s private pains (“Mamie”) and social pleasures (“Girlfriends”) in land dominated by men, and in “A Thousand Pretty Ponies” she offers a classic Montana cowboy poem in rhymed quatrains. Dry Crik Press should be applauded for bringing more cowboy poetry into print, but these books could be improved with numbered pages and biographi­ cal notes on the poets—and, in the case of The Exalted, One, with its several scrambled pages, more diligence in assembly. MICHAEL L.JOHNSON University ofKansas Ordinary Messengers. By Michael Hannon. (Point Reyes Station, California: Float­ ing Island, 1991. 88 pages, $10.00.) The Raven Wakes Me Up. By Stephan Torre. (Point Reyes Station, California: Floating Island, 1992. 42 pages, $8.00.) Within the last year and a half, publisher Michael Sykes has brought out two of the most passionate poets writing in the West, and perhaps in the entire country. I may be reaching for it, but I read Hannon as representative of the Catholic West and Torre of the Protestant landscape. Had I more copy space I could extrapolate on this idea; discuss thematic differences: the books are counterpoint to each other in content and poetic strategy. They are unalike in vision and voice, but alike in intellectual toughness and finish. Michael Hannon writes with a sardonic intensity: brief, compressed asides onJesus, God and the Void. The poet is our contemporary Pascal with, however, a Beckett-like sense of humour. The title of the collection is ironic—the author is no ordinary messenger. I might add, and I have a suspicion that this was intentional, that the first letters in each of the title words form the Tantric syllable om. (The late Kenneth Rexroth said, on the back cover of Hannon’s earlier book, Poems & Days, “A very good poet indeed, and certainly one of the few Tantric writers in any language who is both profound and witty.”) Ordinary Messengersis divided into six sections. Here are two poems, the first from “Stations,” called “Simon is Forced to Carry the Cross”: 278 Western American Literature This could be any one of us: culled from the botched multitude, dragged cursing in the wake of an ambitious god, and made to shoulder His perfection’s dead weight. Hating it, loving it, hating it. . . The second poem, “The Muse,” comes from the “Slender Means”section: I don’t go to her, she comes to me, red with unspeakable crimes and her hair is a black wind annihilating worlds to get at the door in my bed. It takes forever to get her clothes off, and I don’t have forever. If I have a quarrel with Hannon’s work, it is a small one—I would like to hear more news of the outside world and the society where he gets his living as a painting contractor. But this may be asking him to be another kind of poet than he is. Stephen Torre, on the other hand, in The Raven Wakes Me Up, embraces the world “out there” with gusto. His phenomenological purchase is that of men working together, or in isolation, and of their women, or lack of women. Torre brings us news from Montana, northern California and British Columbia. He has worked as a logger and in mills; has farmed and ranched. Most of the poems in the book are too long to quote in full for this...

‘The Fittest Place in Europe for our Profession’: George Richardson in Rome

Surviving letters written by George Richardson from Rome in 1761–2, when he was acting as draughtsman to James Adam, offer a unique picture of the life and education of a young man of humble station and of slender means, but with ambition to become an architect in his own right.

In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading , and: Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark (review)

Reviewed by: In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading, and: Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark Margaret Moan Rowe Claire Sprague , ed. In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 163 pp. $39.95. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe . Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990. 165 pp. $22.50. To review two books, one on Lessing and one on Spark, is to see the remarkable difference in the way these women writers have been approached by their critics. Claire Sprague edits a collection of essays that focuses on "Lessing's current status as an international figure." Borrowing a title used earlier by Dee Seligman, Sprague, who generously acknowledges the debt, notes that Lessing "has become our quarry, the object of our critical pursuit." Herein lies the tale. Much Lessing criticism has become a kind of quest for a mythic author called Doris Lessing, a journey after a grail of sorts. Lessing as idol is certainly there in Claire Sprague's "Introduction" to the collection that included readings of Lessing's work in Canada, Spain, South Africa, France, the United States, England, the USSR, Germany, and Zimbabwe. As one might expect, Lessing's "status" varies from country to country, from reader to reader. Of particular interest to me are the readings from Zimbabwe, South Africa, the United States, and France. In "Reading Doris Lessing's Rhodesian Stories in Zimbabwe," Anthony Chennels offers a fascinating account of Lessing's marginalization "because she was white and because the sense of a Zimbabwan nation is not sufficiently strong in her works [principally her short stories]." Eve Bertelsen, always a critic worth reading, charts Lessing's changing fortunes among South African readers from the fifties through the eighties. In "The Quest and the Quotidian: Doris Lessing in South Africa," Bertelson traces the popularity of the first three novels in The Children of Violence and the decline in that popularity after the publication of The Golden Notebook. Lessing readership waned, especially on the Left, because as Bertelsen concludes, "In a society where the most intimate of human affairs are still oppressively controlled by legislation it is not possible to entertain a contempt for group solidarity and politics. Indeed, such a position seems scarcely 'human' at all." Interestingly enough, it is the publication of The Golden Notebook in 1962 that, according to Ellen Cronan Rose, puts Lessing on the literary map in the United States. Rose offers a particularly informative overview of the growth of academic interest in Lessing's fiction in "From Supermarket to Schoolroom: Doris Lessing in the United States." She also provides interesting material on the beginnings of the Doris Lessing Society that, I would argue, has done much to promote scholarly interest in Lessing's work as well as to promote some academic idolatry. Nicole Ward Jouve captures some of that double response to Lessing in "Doris through the French Looking-Glass." Ever a thoughtful critic, Jouve describes how the publication of a French edition of The Golden Notebook in 1976 turned Lessing into a public figure. Up until then only The Grass Is Singing had been available [End Page 310] in French (1953); Le Carnet d'or changed everything. "All that was known about Lessing herself, and there was much that was by 1976, was channelled by the publishers and used to construct Lessing the novelist as almost more important or of more concern than the novel that was currently coming out." Jouve goes on to offer a shrewd conjecture that this situation may have led Lessing "to devise the Jane Somers hoax." For now, I want to suggest that the doubleness that Nicole Ward Jouve attaches to the publication of Le Carnet d'or is present in much Lessing criticism, including In Pursuit of Doris Lessing. There is no Muriel Spark Society, and Spark criticism seems none the worse for it. Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark focuses on five novels: The Bachelors, The Girls of Slender Means, The Mandlebaum Gate, The Abbess of Crewe and The Takeover. Rodney Edgecombe, of the University of Cape Town, reads each novel in terms...

Vocation and identity in the fiction of Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark's witty novels have long been appreciated by critics. Yet previous studies have been synoptic, trying to cover the entire oeuvre of an immensely prolific novelist. By selecting novels representative of distinct phases in Spark's career, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe is able to explore theme, style, and structure in a detailed way. Spark's conversion to Catholicism is frequently cited as a source of her novelistic voice, the one vocation being seen to result from the other. Edgecombe takes up this issue, showing, through judicious close readings of the novels, how the idea of vocation - whether religious or secular - provides a recurring centre of interest and thematic unity for the poet-turned-novelist. He explores the nature of the voice that finds its outlet in what he calls the epigrammatic structure of Sparks's fiction. Edgecombe shows her best novels to be elegantly incomplete, heavy with implied meaning, and all the more moving for their emotional restraint. This structure of expanded epigram, he argues, is the hallmark of Spark's fiction and is essential to its success. From Spark's early period, which focuses on tight-knit British communities, Edgecombe selects The Bachelors and The Girls of Slender Means, two novels that flank her most famous works and share their density and conciseness. Viewing The Mandelbaum Gate an expansive departure from that early phase, he examines it on its own, before turning to the exilic era of Spark's residence abroad. From this he selects The Abbess of Crewe and The Takeover, each representing different aspects of a problematic phase in Spark's career.

John Keats: poet, patient, physician.

John Keats, son of an ostler , was born in London in 1795. Despite an early interest in literature he was, surprisingly, apprenticed to an apothecary and continued his medical training at Guy's Hospital, obtaining the Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1816. He never practiced medicine. His early poems were not well received, and for the young poet with very slender means, life was difficult. Tragedy was added to difficulty when tuberculosis, which had already caused the death of his mother and uncle, became apparent in his brother Tom, whom Keats nursed through his illness when the brothers were living together in Hampstead . Subsequently Keats developed the disease, but despite its rapid progress, he managed in a single year - 1819 - to produce some of the finest lyrical poetry in the language. He went to Italy in the hope of obtaining a cure but died in Rome in 1821, aged 25. Medicine certainly contributed to the man, but also something to the poet, Keats; his training and his family and personal experience of tuberculosis speak for themselves. More subtly , his medical experience influenced in some degree his ideas and even his choice of words. The interrelations of poet-patient and trainee-physician are examined in this essay.