Muriel Spark, 1918 - 2006.

Novelist Dame Muriel Spark, who wrote the classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, has died in Tuscany where she had made her home.... The book was turned into a much performed play and later a film starring Dame Maggie Smith, for which she won a best actress Oscar in 1969.

The BBC.

Like [Graham] Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Spark was a Catholic convert and dealt with questions of morality and metaphysics, directly or indirectly, in her fiction.

"I don't propagate the Catholic faith but in a funny sort of way, my books couldn't be written by anyone except a Catholic," she told the Sunday Telegraph in 1997.

The AP.

See, too, the Muriel Spark Archive of the National Library of Scotland.

Posted by dwhudson at April 15, 2006 8:33 AM