Spark herself claims not to have any direct literary influences. "I influence myself," she claims. Though her unique combination of wit, satire, and the supernatural demonstrates this judgment to be largely true, she does acknowledge some influences on her prose: I think I would belong, in the writing of prose, to a literary tradition which is connected with the belletrists like Max Beerbohm, a humourist. On the level of thought, Pritchett and that sort of fantasy... . Also, you wouldn't think so, but I owe a lot to Proust. I read Proust over and over again.

Indeed, the writings of Beerbohm—an associate of Oscar Wilde, whose The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) may have influenced Spark's title here—exhibit some of the same elegance and ironic wit of Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Beerbohm's caricatures and an early collection of short fiction, Seven Men...