Despite an early interest in literature, Muriel Spark’s professional writing career began later than many other authors. Following a brief period working as an English teacher and then as a secretary at an Edinburgh department store, the young Muriel Spark emigrated to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), marrying Sidney Oswald Spark in 1937. Their son, Samuel Robin Spark, was born in 1938; however, the Sparks’ marriage was not a happy one and broke up in the early 1940s, with Muriel Spark returning to the United Kingdom in 1944.
Spark then worked for MI6 for the latter part of the Second World War, only beginning to write seriously following the end of the conflict. She began her first novel, The Comforters, in 1954. The work was published in 1957 to great acclaim, including a very positive review by Evelyn Waugh. Spark completed four further novels before the publication of her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in 1961.
During the 1960s, Spark relocated to New York, before moving to Rome in 1967 and then to Tuscany in 1979. Her final novel to be completed, The Finishing School, was published in 2004, with a poetry compendium, All the Poems, published soon after. Muriel Spark passed away in 2006, her literary output spanning over 70 years, including 22 published novels.
Muriel Spark’s childhood, particularly her experiences at school, are said to have influenced The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. One of Muriel Spark’s class teachers at James Gillespie’s High School for Girls in Edinburgh, Christina Kay, is widely regarded as an inspiration for the work’s eponymous heroine. Spark is reputed to have returned to Edinburgh to write the book, on a small wooden table in her parents’ apartment. The work was made into film in 1969 with Maggie Smith delivering a memorable performance in the title-role as “the dangerous Miss Brodie”.
Muriel Spark’s great contribution to literature has been widely recognised, and she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993. Her obituary in the Guardian newspaper on 17 April 2006 wrote that Spark has a “place in the most hallowed annals of Scottish and English literature…”