The Golden Fleece: Essays

‘Good literary essays have sustaining and stimulating qualities, like deep wells and clear rivers.’The essays, reviews, memoirs and other writings collected here for the first time conjure up one of the great critical imaginations of our time. Muriel Spark’s companion, in her preface, remembers how, ‘In the long-ago summer of 1991 Muriel rented a house for the month of July on the German island of Sylt in the North Sea, off Denmark […] Here, in Kampen, I spread out a lifetime of Muriel’s essays and reviews.’ Here The Golden Fleece (which takes its title from Spark’s first published essay) began. Its four sections (Art & Poetry; Autobiography & Travel; Literature; and Religion, Politics & Philosophy) ‘tell many things, mainly about the author’, forming a kind of oblique autobiography, an evolving confession of a powerful individual faith in the human and what transcends it.