Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She attended a prim Edinburgh school that would later inspire her most famous novel, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". She married a "Mr Spark" and moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her husband turned out to be mentally unstable. She left the country when her son was five, depositing the boy in a convent school.
Spark produced 22 novels, including "The Girls of Slender Means" (1963). Her books were slim, but her personal archive is vast, extending to 195 feet (60 metres) of box files—letters, cast-offs and notes. She cultivated an image of effortless composition but in reality laboured intensely over her prose. She could write a book, she said, only once she knew "how it is going to end".
While alive she was the subject of two biographies, both of which she loathed. She attempted to control her own story by writing autobiography but found it difficult. Literary contemporaries held her in high regard: Evelyn Waugh called her a saint, W.H. Auden was awed by her and Graham Greene sent her cheques and bottles of wine.
Frances Wilson's biography "Electric Spark" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Bloomsbury Circus) draws on the full archive.
Rarely do people communicate; they just take turns talking.