Muriel Sarah Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye

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Spark said of her fifth novel,

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

(1960), that she wanted “to write something light and lyrical – as near a poem as a novel could get, and in as few words as possible” (“How I became a Novelist” 1960). Contemporary reviews of the novel emphasised its lightness, but not its “poetry”. A typical review in

The New York Times

, for example, praised, with faint damnation, Spark's “fresh comic style”. It declares: “[no] one is going to read any subtle meanings into her tale . . . . [

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

] rests firmly on gags and nothing more; but the gags have been concealed with ingenuity, the pace is swift, the characters . . . familiar enough” (www:nytimes.com/books/01/03/11/specials/spark.html). This review ignores the poetic features of the…

2807 words

Citation: Scullion, Val. "The Ballad of Peckham Rye". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 July 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1522, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1522 The Ballad of Peckham Rye 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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