The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie often spoke of a woman whose life mirrored her own but ended tragically.

The following is an interview held by Five Books for Catholics with Christopher J. Scalia about Muriel Spark’s life and work. Muriel Spark’s life was as eccentric and messy as any character from her ...

How do you write a book? For Muriel Spark the process was simple. First, the novelist said, “I write the title, and then I write my name.” Then, she explained, “I write ‘Chapter One’ and then I write ...

To celebrate its centenary, The New Yorker invited fiction writers to contribute stories inspired by works from the archive, then to explain why those works inspired them. Sign up to receive the ...

Before she became a novelist, Muriel Spark—best known to American readers as the author of the 1961 novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”—took an interest in what she called “biographical-literary ...

An old literary saying has it that biographers “add a new terror to death.” With two biographies written while she was still breathing, Muriel Spark may have ...

The novelist Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus–level skewering of the ...

Obscured by her reputation as a wit is the fact that Spark was a religious writer—indeed, one of the most important religious writers in modern British literature. She embraced Roman Catholicism in ...