At the end of The Comforters (1957), which was finished late in 1955, Caroline Rose goes off to write her first novel, presumably The Comforters. Muriel Spark acknowledged from the beginning that this work was deliberately experimental, a self-conscious examination of the nature of fictional form. As she says in her interview with Frank Kermode, it is a ‘novel about writing a novel’ (HF 132). In this discussion, she is quite explicit about her suspicion of the art of fiction and speaks of the novel as an ‘inferior way of writing’ (HF 132) when compared to the much tighter structure of poetry. The reasons for writing such a technically ambitious first work are revealed especially in Curriculum Vitae:

According to this telling statement, Spark could not ‘feel ’ like a novelist until she had witnessed herself, from the outside, performing the act of writing a novel. But, because this is a ‘process peculiar to myself’, Spark also needs to enact her new sense of self from the inside as well. This is why Caroline Rose is oddly a character in a novel who writes about ‘Characters in a novel ’ (C 202). The Comforters is especially concerned with her sense of having a fragmented self which, if not unified, will lead to insanity. The mythomaniacal Baron Willi Stock, for instance, speaks of the ‘madness of scholarly curiosity … to be interested and at the same time disinterested’ (C 130). This doubleness, both inside and outside, interested and disinterested, above all characterizes Caroline's neurotically fractured self. Her hallucinations, after all, take the form of hearing voices created by a ‘Typing Ghost’ (C 161) which turn her life into a narrative. Writing and madness are, in this way, intimately related in this book and in much of Spark's work.