A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark

“I was Mrs Hawkins” is the theme of one of Spark’s later novels of a rooming house and its residents, of publishing houses and their weaknesses, and of a remarkable woman’s view of postwar London life in precisely 1954. Published in 1988, this story of a looking back on a life from decades later as a different person in so many ways is full of the dry humour and sharp observations of the author best known for her portrait of the formidable Miss Jean Brodie. It deals with the small details of life and especially other people; the words, gestures and more that convey a real sense of a person, and the settings of rooms, houses, even travelling on London buses that are described with near forensic precision. The people of the world of Mrs Hawkins are tremendously varied, from self -conscious…