Spark: An artist and a woman

Now that I come to write this section of my autobiography I remember vividly, in those days when I was writing Warrender Chase, without any great hope of ever getting it published, but with only the excited compulsion to write it, how I walked home across the park one evening, thinking hard about my novel and Beryl Tims as a type, and I stopped in the middle of the pathway. People passed me, both ways, going home from their daily work, like myself. Whatever I had been specifically thinking about the typology of Mrs Tims went completely out of my mind. People passed me as I stood. Young men with dark suits and girls wearing hats and tailored-looking coats. the thought came to me in a most articulate way: 'How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.' [25]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.