Prime of Miss Jean Brodie author dies

Muriel Spark wrote novels of faith and desire. Picture / Reuters

LONDON - Dame Muriel Spark, one of the greatest post-war novelists and creator of some of modern literature's most endearing and complex characters, including the much-loved, Mussolini-admiring Edinburgh schoolmistress Miss Jean Brodie, has died.

Confirmation of Spark's death at age 88 in a hospital in Florence on Friday came only yesterday and was announced by the Mayor of Civitella della Chiana - the ancient Tuscan town where she had lived for nearly 30 years.

Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Jewish Lithuanian father and English mother, Spark's first novel, The Comforters, was not published until 1957.

Her novels - nearly two dozen, the last of which, The Finishing School, was published in 2004 - are intricately woven tales of faith and desire, with goodness often gone astray and badness at large.

Spark's finest works include The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Girls of Slender Means and The Abbess of Crewe, a parody of the Watergate scandal. But it was The Prime of  Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1962, that brought wider fame.

Jean Brodie, played by Maggie Smith in the 1969 film of the novel, a role which won her an Oscar, became emblematic of the clash of passion and intellect with the constraints of humdrum reality and the passing of time.

"All my pupils are the creme de la creme," Miss Brodie says in the book. "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."

Spark converted to Catholicism in 1954. In 1968 she moved to Rome and then Tuscany. She was created a dame in 1993.

- INDEPENDENT