All the great heroines created by Dame Muriel Spark, who died in Florence aged 88, enunciate with the unmistakable, perfectly pitched voice of She Who Can Do No Wrong, immaculately hatted and gloved, neatly wired into a personal hotline to God.
Nancy ("Mrs") Hawkins, narrator of Spark's most affectionately autobiographical novel, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), is a good example: "I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do. At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line. It is enough for me to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God."
No other writer has ever come close to imitating this special narrative voice. In its waspishness, its spirit, its curiously posh-Scottish camp, it is one of the great creations of postwar British writing.
Like many women artists, Muriel Spark found her voice comparatively late in a hitherto difficult life. She was 39, a struggling single mother and recently recovered from a serious breakdown, when the first of her 20 novels, The Comforters, was published in 1957.
Up to the middle 1970s, Spark published about a novel a year, plus dozens of short stories, plays and essays. In 1961 she published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her legendary tale of the Edinburgh spinster schoolteacher who devotes her middle years to her "gerrils", to Mussolini and to having illicit sex. The success of Miss Jean Brodie, in its Broadway, film and television versions, assured her financial security for life,and a place in the most hallowed annals of Scottish and English literature. She became a dame in 1993.
She was born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish engineer father and an English music-teacher mother, in the genteel Edinburgh inner suburb of Bruntsfield. In Curriculum Vitae, her purse-lipped autobiography of 1992, she encourages readers to see her childhood as economically straitened but content. She was educated at the nearby James Gillespie's school for girls - the model for Miss Jean Brodie's Marcia Blaine's. As a child she read Scott, Swinburne and Browning, and at 14 she won first prize in a poetry competition commemorating Walter Scott's death.
She enrolled in a course in precis writing at Edinburgh's Heriot Watt College, but did not go to university. She learned secretarial skills and worked in an Edinburgh department store. In 1937, she married Sydney Oswald Spark, an older man and, apparently, "a borderline case", about to embark on a three-year stint as a schoolteacher in Rhodesia. Thus began a time of great unhappiness, but which would prove formative in the long run.
Spark fled in 1944 from an increasingly violent relationship and from Africa, her baby son Robin following a year later. She chose to hang on though to what she saw as her husband's most useful asset: "Camberg was a good name, but comparatively flat. Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and fun."
In London at the end of the war, Spark set about making a living, sending her son to live with his grandparents in Edinburgh. She worked for British intelligence and at the Poetry Society, and teamed up with literary journalist Derek Stanford to work on critical studies of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë and John Masefield, among others. In 1951 she entered a short story competition in the Observer newspaper with The Seraph and the Zambesi, which out of nearly 7,000 entries, won the £250 first prize.
Her first poetry collection, The Fanfarlo and Other Verse, was published in 1952.
The strain of a life lived in some poverty was beginning to wear her out. Spark eventually collapsed, emotionally and physically, in 1954. The crisis was in part brought on by diet pills, which she was popping in place of regular meals, and in part by TS Eliot, whose verse Spark started believing was full of secret messages encoded in ancient Greek. But the crisis was also profoundly spiritual.
A year before, she had been baptised into the Church of England, heading straight for Eliot's Anglo-Catholic wing. Yet her crisis was resolved only when she converted to Roman Catholicism, a decision whose ramifications would be felt in every aspect of her life and art. Her convalescence was financially supported by fellow convert Graham Greene, who sent money and red wine, on condition that Spark would not ever, ever pray for him. A priest found the Camberwell bedsit from which she wrote her early novels.
Around the time of her conversion to Catholicism, her son, who became a painter, embraced Judaism, claiming that his maternal grandmother was Jewish, thus making him a Jew; Spark always maintained that although her father was Jewish, her mother was not. This dispute - about his and her heritage - became a public feud which lasted into her later years.
Spark always said she found it impossible to explain exactly why she had discovered religion at that point in her life. "The simple explanation is that I felt the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I had always known and believed; the more difficult explanation would involve the step-by-step building up of a conviction."
Most of her fiction, of course, does feature the odd bit of conventionally Catholic hanky-panky, in the shape of the occasional corrupted nun. But the real spiritual argument happens in how her weirdly cut and twisting narratives unfold: a death foretold long before a person's story has even started, as in The Driver's Seat (1970) or The Hothouse by the East River (1973); the interest in how superstition and other forms of false consciousness precipitate evil actions, as in The Bachelors (1960) or The Girls of Slender Means (1963).
In 1963 Spark abandoned Britain forever, mainly, she confessed, to get away from old friends from whom her sudden success had estranged her. She seems to have been especially eager to avoid Derek Stanford, who had published a disturbing study-cum-memoir of his former collaborator and friend.
Spark moved first to New York, where she had a staff writer's booth at the New Yorker and then, in 1967, to Rome. She had reinvented herself again, as a super-successful lady wit: perfect hair and maquillage, expensive jewellery, furs; a smart apartment full of Scandinavian furniture just across the road from the Vatican.
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), about faith and politics in the Middle East, may have been a relative artistic failure, but it was obviously crucial to her growing sense of world and self. The 1970s saw Spark flitting edgily between a harsh, lurid satire and something close to the French nouveau roman. It was only with the delightfully autobiographical Loitering with Intent (1981) that she seemed again expansive and relaxed.
In 1968, Spark had met Penelope Jardine, then a young woman of means studying art in Rome. In the early 1970s, Miss Jardine, as one was expected to call her, accompanied her to Oliveto, Tuscany, which was where both women lived and worked right up to Spark's death.
She is survived by her son, Robin.
Muriel Sarah Spark, born February 1st, 1918; died April 13th, 2006