Lise is thin. Her height is about five-foot-six. Her hair is pale brown, probably tinted … she might be as young as twenty-nine or as old as thirty-six.” To accept the narrative as the sum of many voices throws doubt on its reliability. Why should we accept their portrayal of Lise, given each has their own agenda?

Whydunnit in Q-Sharp Major - The New York Times Web Archive A Whydunnit in Q-Sharp Major - The New York Times Web Archive

Anne Donovan on Writing: ‘Buddha Da’, ‘Being Emily’, and the Importance of Language | Interview by Adrian Searle (2008) By Maggie Scott Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984.Spark of Genius" (magazine), Doublethink (a consideration of the author's work), no.Winter, 2006, archived from the original on 9 July 2006 , retrieved 12 July 2006 . mind. "Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?" asks the author. The reader knows Lise's thoughts by what she does, by what she sees, by the people she meets. As in Kafka, the secret motives of the central character determine Dame Muriel Sarah Spark DBE FRSE FRSL ( née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) [1] was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Spark began writing seriously, under her married name, after World War II, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947 she became editor of the Poetry Review. This position made Spark one of the few female editors of the time. [15] Spark left the Poetry Review in 1948. [15] In 1953 Muriel Spark was baptized in the Church of England but in 1954 she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. [1] She was formally instructed by Dom Ambrose Agius, a Benedictine monk of Ealing Priory, whom she had known from her Poetry Society days, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 1st May 1954 by Dom Ambrose. Penelope Fitzgerald, a fellow novelist and contemporary of Spark, wrote that Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic ... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do". [16] In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing that she "was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that – would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion – whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know – but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence." Graham Greene, Gabriel Fielding and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision. Companion shelves 'unfair' Spark biography", The Telegraph, 15 March 2016, archived from the original on 6 July 2020 , retrieved 6 July 2020 .

Spark: The Driver’s Seat | The Modern Novel Spark: The Driver’s Seat | The Modern Novel

Sleeman, Elizabeth (2002). The International Who's Who of Women 2002. London, England: Europa Publications. p.540. ISBN 978-1857431223. young man, Bill the Macrobiotic, thinks he has found what he has been looking for in Lise. "You need love," says Bill, who is on Regime Seven, which requires one orgasm a day. "I'm not interested in sex," says Lise is killed, and her killer will ask our sympathy for the two lives destroyed: “She told me precisely what to do. I was hoping to start a new life.”

Lise is going on holiday. It’s important to her to find a remarkable dress – the gaudier, the better. Her colleagues support her vacation (there’s a suggestion of an illness). Lise lives an arid, untouched life: she’s a loner. She’s somewhat unhinged, laughing alone and talking on the phone even after the other person has hung up. The message of "The Driver's Seat" is that under conditions the victim sits in the driver's seat. Out of motives secret even to himself, he arranges his own victimization. The reader is never given directly what goes on in Lise's thinks she is the God of Calvin." The convert-heroines of "The Comforters,""Robinson,""Memento Mori" and "The Mandelbaum Gate" are in various ways like Muriel Spark, who is also a convert, Being in Lise's presence is frequently excruciating. We are encouraged to laugh at her – but constantly reminded that to do so is awful. Especially when Lise herself mirrors that laughter with her own mad hilarity: "'Dressed for a carnival' says a woman looking grossly at Lise as she passes, and laughing as she goes her way, laughing without a possibility of restraint, like a stream bound to descend whatever slope lies before it."

at the Lost Booker: Muriel Spark Looking back at the Lost Booker: Muriel Spark

Our Records: Muriel Spark and Scottish births in 1918". www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. ScotlandsPeople. 7 January 2019 . Retrieved 22 March 2022. This is the joke at Lise’s expense. She’s not in ‘the driver’s seat’. She delegates the moment of her death (or orgasm – popularised by Freud as “the little death”) to a man.

Lingard, Joan (1981), review of Loitering with Intent, in Murray, Glen (ed.), Cencrastus No. 6, Autumn 1981, pp.41 & 42 The Driver’s Seat reveals a woman’s murder in the words of the eye witnesses – but the story they tell can’t be trusted. The first interpretation makes the murderer the victim. The second brings sense and honour to Lise’s life. This is what the question of the title comes down to: who’s responsible for Lise’s death? Is it murder, or suicide? Design, or accident? Who, exactly, is in the driving seat? The ‘second narrative’ theory he is driven into heresy and ersatz religion, like Bill the Macrobiotic and Mrs. Friedke the Jehovah's Witness, or he is driven like Lise and the rosy-faced young man into neurosis and self-destruction. Lise is only in the driver's