About the Author

Born in Edinburgh and educated at Gillespie's School for Girls, Spark now lives in Tuscany. Her most well-known work is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), a witty portrait of a highly individual and influential teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school between the wars. The themes of religious fanaticism and the occult run through The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) which explores the manifestation of satanism in a prosaic suburb. Spark's imaginative prose has a highly characteristic tone. Her books are short, cool, dark and witty, while their engagement with moral or even metaphyical questions can be humourous, disturbing, bizarre and surreal. As a Scot with a Jewish-Presbyterian background converted to Catholicism, she has always had an awareness of dualities and moral ambiguity, along with a sharp outsider's eye for the vagaries of polite society and the metropolitan scene.