Although she is known primarily as a prolific novelist, Muriel Spark began her writing career with a short story. Her first published work of fiction, "The Seraph and the Zambesi" (Observer, December 1951; collected in The Go-Away Bird with Other Stories, 1958), appeared six years before her first novel, The Comforters (1957). According to Karl Malkoff in Muriel Spark (1968), Spark seems to have considered novels "an inferior way of writing" when the publisher Macmillan suggested in 1954 that she write a novel for them. Her first book of creative writing, The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952), was a volume of poetry. Even after Spark turned her attention mainly to novels, she continued to write short stories. In a 1989 interview with Jeanne Devoize and Pamela Valette she stated:

I feel the short story is superior [to the novel], it's more difficult.... I really do think the short story is something by itself and it's...