Born in 1918, Spark was nearly 40 years of age when she completed The Comforters (1957), her first novel. Over the next five decades, she published twenty-one novels, three volumes of short stories, and the occasional play, collection of poetry and children's work. The phenomenal success of Spark's sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) – as a stage-play, feature film and television series – has ensured that she retains a popular appeal. After gaining innumerable literary prizes and academic awards, she is now widely considered to be one of the ‘most engaging, most tantalising’ writers of her generation. What is extraordinary about Spark's achievement is that as well as having a large international readership she manages to engage with many of the most serious intellectual issues of her time. It is typical of her work that it both gestures towards and acknowledges many of the debates and concerns of the age without, ever, being wholly reliant on them. Academic critics have begun to appropriate Spark in the name of literary and cultural theory, but this can be somewhat reductive. As Bent Nordhjem has argued, Spark's engagement with fashionable theoretical questions is always partial and fragmentary:

Spark's ability to subsume the larger cultural questions of her day is in part a consequence of her formative years as a literary critic. Along with a collection of poetry, her books in the early 1950s consisted of a tribute to William Wordsworth; a reassessment of Mary Shelley and selection of her letters; editions of the poems and of letters of Emily Brontë; and an account of John Masefield. Spark might well have continued as a critic and occasional poet if it were not for the publication of ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’ (1951) which won the Observer short story prize.