All About Scotland

It was only from the late 1950s that she began to make her mark as a fiction writer, with works such as Momento Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Her best known novel, and the one which firmly established her public profile, is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the tale of an eccentric Edinburgh school ma'am with rather unusual teaching methods (which was later filmed with Dame Maggie Smith in the lead role). In her subsequent work, Spark explored settings and characters where the familiar and commonplace often had sinister and/or bizarre overtones.