In the Driver’s Seat: Muriel Spark’s Editorship of the Poetry Review

For just over a year in 1947–1948, Muriel Spark was editor of the prestigious but conservative Poetry Review in London, the journal of the Poetry Society. This made her the only female editor of a little magazine in Britain at the time, and one of the very few in the English-speaking world. Her editorship was short-lived, apparently because her preference for modernist poetry and her policy of publishing new writers offended many of the Society’s members. In this paper I look more closely at Spark’s innovative editorship and the reasons it came to a premature end, drawing on a reading of the magazine and also on the Spark archives.