Muriel Spark

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is one of the finest books I ever read. Also a first-rate film and stage-play. "Memento Mori" is also good, but nothing beats "Miss Brodie". I thought it tended to overshadow everything else she wrote, just like "Dr. Finlay's Casebook" overshadowed the rest of A.J. Cronin's output. Her more recent stuff, what I have read of it, doesn't seem to me to come close to the quality of her earlier stuff.

Read 'The Driver's Seat'. That is perhaps one of the heaviest books I've ever read, and I'm not talking about amounts of pages. I was shocked that it could ever have been written. Now, if this book had been written by a man... I've read quite a few of hers and I think she and Patricia Highsmith were separated at birth. Very unique imaginations, and an odd little world off characters that easily rivals those of Graham Greene's.

Spark wrote "Memento Mori"? Didn't know that. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is superb, definitely one of the better books that was on my sixties fiction course. All apart from page 85. Page 85 is bad.