It’s the birthday of Muriel Spark (1918-2006), best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and for writing novels “as slim as stiletto blades—and as deadly” (“The Guardian view on Muriel Spark: gauzy wit and philosophical depth,” editorial, The Guardian, Feb. 1, 2018).

Spark was born Muriel Camberg in a suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at a school for girls that would become the model for the school in Miss Jean Brodie. Though gifted in literature, Spark did not go to a university, instead studying to be a secretary and then marrying an older man, Sydney Oswald Spark, when she was just 19, and moving with him to Rhodesia. SOS (as she referred to him) was unstable and violent, and in 1944 Spark ditched him but deliberately kept his name because, she said, “Camberg was a good name, but comparatively flat. Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and fun.” SOS ended up in an asylum.

Spark and her husband had had a son, Robin, so she was now a single mother. While her parents raised her son, Spark wrote propaganda for British intelligence—seriously, that had to be entertaining—worked for the Poetry Society and The Poetry Review, and wrote literary criticism. She also started publishing poetry. By now she was a bit of a starving artist, living on diet pills and stress, and in 1954 she had a breakdown. Right around the same time, she converted to Catholicism and at this desperate time received financial help and crates of red wine from fellow Catholic writer Graham Greene, who stipulated only that Spark must never ever pray for him or thank him.

Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), was published when Spark was 39 and tells the story of a woman trying to write a novel who has a breakdown and starts thinking she’s a character in her own novel—a fairly autobiographical debut. More than 20 novels followed, including Miss Jean Brodie, a couple that were shortlisted for the Booker (The Public Image, 1968, and Loitering with Intent, 1981), and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), which is supposed to be a great novel to start with if you haven’t read Spark.

Spark left Britain in 1963, moving to New York, Rome, and finally Oliveto, Tuscany, where she lived for the rest of her life with her friend, the artist Penelope Jardine. (The two were rumored at times to be a couple but maybe weren’t; Spark always denied it.) Spark was a difficult person, fierce and fiercely alone. Later in life she was estranged from Robin over their religious disagreements (Spark’s grandmother had been Jewish and Robin became an Orthodox Jew), and when Spark received the O.B.E. in 1967, she would not invite Robin to Buckingham Palace. Spark was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993. She was 88 when she died at a hospital in Florence, leaving a legacy of uniquely witty and heartless novels.

Have a mentally healthy Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.