I’ve just received a book I ordered about John Masefield, written by the novelist Muriel Spark. Muriel was born in 1918 and maybe her best known novel is ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, published in 1961. However eight years previously she had published the study of John Masefield; she wrote several studies of other writers, including Mary Shelley and the Brontë sisters. I am looking forward to reading Spark’s book as she met Masefield in 1950; by then he was the Poet Laureate, and she describes him as a ‘most unaffectedly gracious, kind and sweet—an absolute poppet‘, and ‘his interest in all varieties of life’s manifestations is still avid‘.
I have another biography of Masefield by Constance Babbington Smith; it contained an enormous amount of information about him and there was patently a lot of research in the book, but somehow it seemed a little flat to me, there was no spark – maybe Muriel will give me that!
Lois Elsden 