The book which most closely resembles The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is, in many ways, the largely unsung The Ballad of Peckham Rye. This comparison is often obscured by the phenomenal success of Spark's sixth novel as a stage-play, feature film and television series. But both works have deceptively attractive and forceful protagonists whose Scottishness defines their difference from convention and helps proclaim their anarchic presence. These determinedly amoral figures paradoxically act as a catalyst to elicit the spiritual life of others. They both exist as witty and alluring personalities who, in a skilful sleight of hand, appear to elude the author's narrative control. Such rampant singularity means that Dougal Douglas and Jean Brodie attempt, not unlike their author, to determine reality. The fact that the figure of Jean Brodie can be so easily extracted from an elaborate and closely textured story-line points to Spark's overpowering fascination with her. That Brodie exists so completely above and beyond the written text is especially startling when we remember that the novel, more than any other to date, is distinguished on the page, as opposed to the stage or screen, by a fragmented and continually shifting narrative.

But as soon as one compares her later and earlier works it becomes clear that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, along with The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), have achieved a level of literary sophistication that does eclipse much of what has gone before. Unlike her previous books, Spark now takes absolutely seriously the question of locale and historical context. If her first five novels could easily have been situated anywhere at just about any time, her next three could only have been set in Edinburgh, London and Jerusalem in the 1930s, mid- 1940s and early 1960s respectively. They are all related in some way to the history of fascism and the Second World War and its aftermath. What is more, these histories are subtly interwoven into Spark's more abstract moralizing. Whereas her earlier books take specific instances from her past and mythologize them, these later works more thoroughly locate her life-story in time and place so as to explore as fiction many of her past selves and identities.