Bluebell: Muriel Spark's Life in Dress

In her autobiography Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark recalls acquiring a dress that belonged to her grandmother: Bluebell is what I called my grand-mother’s lovely blue silk brocade going-away dress the colour of cornflowers. I had never seen anything quite so beautiful, nor touched anything so sensuous before or since. Regretfully, aged 74, she notes that, aged 13, she cut the dress up to make cushion covers: They looked wonderful, but the dress itself should never have been touched. It glowed with its deep and heavy brocaded blueness. It was sewn by hand, within a minutely stitched lining. In 1958, Spark commemorated ‘Bluebell’ as the feline companion of the protagonist in her novel Robinson, suggesting an equivalence between pets and treasured heirloom garments. Her writing is replete with acutely observed details that illustrate how closely her appreciation of fashion as a personal enjoyment, family history, emotional attachment, cultural signifier and dramatic device translates from her life to her work. She is known to have celebrated career successes by purchasing new clothes and jewellery and to have staged the language of fashion advertising within her novels to define particular ‘types’. This paper will ally the work of Hope Howell Hodgkins, Martin Stannard and Spark with archival research to discuss specific points of translation from life into writing through dress. It will anticipate the use of Spark’s personal garments in the forthcoming Centenary exhibition, ‘The International Style of Muriel Spark’ at the National Library of Scotland, to describe significant geographical locations in her life