Writer

There is a plaque at Warrender Park Crescent (former James Gillespie's Girls School)

Muriel Spark was born Muriel Camberg at 160 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh, in 1918. Her father, Bernard Camberg, was an engineer with the North British Rubber works.

Her mother, Sarah Uezzell, was from Hertfordshire in England and in her autobiography Spark wrote of her self-consciousness about her mother's Englishness. "My mother, who was English, used to come and fetch me from school … One day, outside the school, I heard my mother remark to another mother, 'I have some shopping to do'. I nearly died. She should have said, 'I've got to get the messages.' That's what she should have said … My father spoke with a strong Edinburgh accent and, although he was a Jew, having been born and educated in Edinburgh of Scottish-Jewish parents, he wore the same sort of clothes as the other fathers and spoke as they did. So he was no problem."

Muriel Spark was educated at James Gillespie's Girls School across Bruntsfield Links from her parents' flat in Bruntsfield Place. She left school in 1935, and attended Heriot-Watt College, taking a course in précis-writing. She taught briefly in exchange for tuition in secretarial skills, and worked in the office of a women's department store until 1937. She left Edinburgh when she was 19 and went to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to marry Oswald Spark who was 13 years her senior. They had a son, Robin, but the marriage failed because of her husband's mental health problems and they divorced in 1944.

Following the divorce Muriel Spark retained her married name so that she would share her son's name. Her acquired name was also wonderfully appropriate for the kind of sharp and ironic wit which marks her writing and which she herself drew attention to in her autobiography: "when I began my literary career Camberg was a good name, but comparatively flat. Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and fun."

After she returned to Britain in early 1944, her son was looked after by her parents in Edinburgh and she moved to London where she worked in a department of the Intelligence Service. In 1947 she became secretary to the Poetry Society in London and, in 1948, was briefly editor of Poetry Review, where she encouraged modern poets. She published poetry herself, did some joint literary editing of Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley, and in 1953 published some critical works and a life of John Masefield.

Spark was 39 when The Comforter, her first novel, was published in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) was her sixth novel. It is the only novel she set in Edinburgh and is notable for the ambiguous and complex portrait it draws of the charismatic and dangerous Jean Brodie, teaching in a school very like James Gillespie's. Spark has acknowledged that her own favourite teacher, Christina Kay, "bore within her the seeds of the future Miss Brodie". Since Brodie she has written thirteen novels, the most recent being Symposium (1990) and the autobiography Curriculum Vitae (1992). She is also a notable short story writer with several published collections. She has received many literary prizes and honours including an honorary DLitt from the University of Edinburgh in 1989. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993.

Alexander Moffat's portrait of her can be seen at the Scottish National Portrait gallery, Queen Street, Edinburgh. The National Library of Scotland has extensive holdings of her personal papers from the 1940s to the present day.

Dame Muriel Spark died at her home in Italy at the age of 88 on Thursday 13th April 2006.