SOURCE: "In the Great Tradition: The Prime of Muriel Spark," in The Commonweal, Vol. 75, No. 22, February 23, 1962, pp. 562-63, 567-68.

Hynes is an American educator and critic. In the review below, he comments on Spark's previous novels and argues that, like her earlier works, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is "intricately designed, and concerned with religious ideas."

In this age of book clubs and television interviews and full-page advertisements, it is comforting (and perhaps snobbishly satisfying as well) to find now and then a writer who has made a reputation simply by being read and admired. Only five years have passed since Muriel Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, but that book, and the five she has written since then, have given her a status among younger British novelists as secure as anyone's.

No one who claims to be informed on the current state of fiction can...