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With the publication of her first novel, The Comforters in 1957, Muriel Spark attracted the attention and support of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, and a brilliant literary career was launched. Muriel Spark soon settled into a schedule of regular publication: since 1957 she has published twenty more novels-most recently The Finishing School (2004)- biographies, plays, poems, an autobiography, and dozens of essays on topics as diverse as Shelley's residence in Venice, the desegregation of art, Piero della Francesca's fresco, "The Madonna del Parto," the Book of Job, and Marcel Proust.
Born Muriel Sarah Camberg to a Jewish father and an Anglican mother (Edinburgh, 1918), the woman described by David Lodge as "the most gifted and innovative British writer of her generation," attended one of Edinburgh's distinguished secondary schools, James Gillespie's School for Girls, then took courses at Herriot Watt College, before departing for Rhodesia, where she married Sydney Oswald Spark, a man thirteen years her senior; they had one child, a son named Robin. Returning alone to England (the marriage would later be dissolved) during World War II, Spark went to work for British counterintelligence. After the War, she became Secretary of the Poetry Society and began to write more verse of her own (she had begun as a child, winning the Sir Walter Scott Prize for her poem, "Out of a Book," in 1930). Spark came to literary prominence in 1951, not for her poetry, but for her short story, "The Seraph and the Zambesi," which was selected from nearly 7000 entries as winner of a contest sponsored by the Observer newspaper. From that point on, most of her creative energies have been devoted to writing fiction. Though she has continued to write essays, poetry, and short stories (five collections, including, most recently, All the Stories of Muriel Spark (2001) and The Ghost Stones of Muriel Spark (2004); new stories appear from time to time in The New Yorker), she is best known for her novels, in particular The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962), first published in its entirety by William Shawn in The New Yorker, and later adapted for film and the stage; the play is frequently revived, most recently in a production starring Fiona Shaw at the National in London...