SPARK, Muriel ~ Loitering with Intent. Signed by the author.

FIRST UK PRINTING. The Bodley Head, London: 1981

8vo., orange boards lettered in gilt to backstrip; together in the unclipped pictorial dustwrapper designed by Michael Harvey; (£6.50 net); THE BOOK near-fine, just a little bruised to foot of spine; the odd spot to the outer edge of the text block; the WRAPPER essentially fine, just a tad creased at edges. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First edition, boldly signed by the author to the front free endpaper. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the year of publication, 'Loitering with Intent' blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and follows a protagonist, Fleur, similar to the young Spark herself, as she struggles to publish her first novel whilst working under the prying eye of Sir Quentin Oliver. When Fleur begins to notice parts of her novel playing out in real life, she suspects her enigmatic and slightly sinister boss may be blackmailing members of the Autobiographical Association for which she works. "Who is mad and who is sane?" states the blurb, "Is truth stranger than fiction and, harder to answer, which is which?" The work bears similarities with Spark's own first novel, 'The Comforters', which describes a writer who discovers she is herself a character in a novel. It also draws on the author's own personal experiences of living as a struggling female writer in post-war London. Spark had begun to write poetry and literary criticism in 1945, and in 1947 she became editor of the Poetry Review, making her one of the few female editors at the time. "How wonderful it was to be a woman and an artist in the middle of the twentieth century", Fleur claims, perhaps a little ironically. A humorous and intriguing work, scarce signed.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Fine