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Fellow writers praise Muriel Spark

Tributes flowed on Saturday night for Muriel Spark, one of postwar Britain's most distinguished writers and the author of novels including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, who died last week at the age of 88.

Spark passed away last Thursday in a hospital in Florence. She was buried on Saturday afternoon at the parish church in the Tuscan village of Civitella della Chiana, where she had lived for 27 years, continuing to produce spare, strange and darkly humorous novels to the end.

Mark Lawson, the critic and novelist, said: "In literary terms she was the last of a generation, just younger than Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene [all Catholic converts], who helped her and sent her money early in her career. She was one of the most original prose stylists ever."

Alan Taylor, a writer and friend of Spark for 20 years, said: "She was effervescent, wonderfully witty, fantastic company, very generous, highly intelligent and a star. She remained girlishly flirtatious to the end ... She always had a poem she was working on in her bag. For a Catholic, she did have a Calvinist work ethic."

Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in February 1918, she was an impoverished writer -- "I was literally starving, I had nothing to eat" -- until she beat nearly 7,000 entrants to win a Christmas short story competition in the Observer newspaper in 1951. The editor, David Astor, personally delivered her a copy of the paper containing her winning entry, The Seraph and the Zambezi.

Spark converted to Catholicism in 1954 and received the encouragement of two famous converts. Greene gave her an allowance of ?20 (US$35) a month and sent crates of red wine "to take the chill off cold charity," on condition that she did not thank him or pray for him.

Waugh heaped praised on her first novel, The Comforters (1957).

She took only six weeks to write The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), based around her schooldays at James Gillespie's High School for Girls in Edinburgh.

After a brief spell in New York, Spark moved to Rome and later into a converted 13th-century church in Tuscany owned by Penelope Jardine, a painter and sculptor. In later years interviewers ventured nervously to the home in the hills wondering how they could broach rumors that Spark and Jardine were in a relationship. They were put at ease when Spark raised the subject herself and dismissed it as nonsense with winning candor.

Spark had married at 19 to Sidney Oswald Spark, a schoolteacher, and gave birth to a son, Robin, who became estranged from her.
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