Spark's first novel, The Comforters (1957), has significant connections to The Ballad of Peckham Rye. It too is concerned with how a character can control or influence others. Its main character, a novelist, finds herself hearing voices and tries to write her novel despite the interference of a ghost who types portions of it for her. In a sense, Spark has taken this typing ghost and made it physical in the character of Dougal Douglas. The Comforters also plays with time and with its own status as a made fictional object: the first chapter of the novel being written in The Comforters is The Comforters itself. The Comforters also shares with The Ballad of Peckham Rye a focus on a small set of characters and a concern with social satire. Spark's more famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), while also infused with absurd and unpredictable...