Muriel Spark now world-famous for many long years, worked as a secretary and then a poet and literary journalist. She was appreciated wherever she went, but was completely unknown to the world, and impoverished, until she started her career as a story writer and novelist. Then everything changed literally overnight.

From 1957, and the appearance of her first novel, she was warmly applauded by many famous writers of the day including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Lord David Cecil and hosts of others in the literary establishment.

Her novel THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE was published in its entirety in The New Yorker, was made into a play on Broadway and the West End of London and then a famous film for which Maggie Smith obtained an Oscar. The film was a Royal Command Performance, attended by all the royal Family at Leicester Square.

Muriel Spark was created a Dame in 1993. She received many honorary degrees from universities - London, Edinburgh, Oxford, to name a few - and was awarded countless prizes and honours, both international and national, as well as being translated into all major languages.

There is a flourishing Muriel Spark Society based in her birthplace, Edinburgh.

She died on 13th April 2006, aged 88.

Passionately determined to write his novel whilst running College Sunrise, a finishing school for both sexes and mixed nationalities, Rowland Mahler is assisted by his wife, Nina Parker. When a 17-year-old pupil's own novel takes shape while his own flounders, Rowland becomes increasingly obsessed.