Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. `In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,' Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the `girls of slender means', editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.