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ROME - Dame Muriel Spark, whose spare and humorous novels made her one of the most admired British writers of the postwar years, has died in Tuscany, Italian officials said yesterday. She was 88.
Spark wrote more than 20 novels, including "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," which was later adapted for a Broadway hit and a movie.
Spark had lived in Italy since the late 1960s, first in Rome and later in a converted 13th-century church in Tuscany with her friend of many years, painter and sculptor Penelope Jardine.
But she retained the accent of her birth and youth in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she was taught by the prototype for her most famous character - Miss Jean Brodie.
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