SOURCE: "Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in Ten Modern Scottish Novels, Aberdeen University Press, 1984, pp. 100-22.

In the excerpt below, Murray and Tait focus on Spark's handling of character development, the theme of religion, and literary technique in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Three very different novelists … have one thing in common; an adult conversion to Roman Catholicism. They are Fionn MacColla, Muriel Spark and George Mackay Brown. Brown we must meantime leave to one side: his religious beliefs form an integral part of a personal vision of natural harmony in Greenvoe. Can anything useful be said in comparing such disparate novelists as MacColla and Spark? Well, both are concerned with Scottish Calvinism in their novels. MacColla reacted vigorously against an extreme Calvinist upbringing, and makes his critique of Calvinism central to all his novels. Spark, on the other hand, was raised in Edinburgh...