Muriel Spark

British · 1918 to 2006

Born Muriel Sarah Camberg on February 1, 1918, in the Bruntsfield district of Edinburgh, the daughter of a Jewish Lithuanian-Scottish engineer and an English Anglican mother, she was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls, where a teacher named Christina Kay became the model for the most famous of her characters. At nineteen she sailed to Southern Rhodesia to marry Sydney Oswald Spark, thirteen years her senior; within months she discovered his violent manic depression. She bore a son, left her husband, placed the boy in a convent school, and worked her passage back to wartime London in 1944, where she joined the Foreign Office's black-propaganda unit at Woburn Abbey. After the war she edited the Poetry Review, suffered a breakdown brought on by Dexedrine prescribed for slimming, and in 1954 was received into the Roman Catholic Church, the act she said allowed her to begin writing novels. The Comforters (1957), her first, was praised by Evelyn Waugh. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), set in the Edinburgh classroom of her girlhood and narrated with the flash-forwards that became her signature, made her reputation when the New Yorker printed it complete in a single issue. The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Driver's Seat (1970), and Loitering with Intent (1981) followed, novels of cool malice and Catholic dread fitted into 150 sharp-edged pages. She moved to New York, then Rome, then a Tuscan village near Civitella, where she lived for the last thirty years with the artist Penelope Jardine, disinherited her son, and was made a Dame in 1993. She died in Florence on April 13, 2006, at eighty-eight.