The two questions that are put to Muriel Spark most frequently are these: Are your novels autobiographical? and Why did you become a Catholic? The first of these questions Muriel Spark has consistently deflected. Now in this volume, she gives her readers the answers to both questions. In her first novel, The Comforters, Mrs Spark wrote about a young woman recently converted to Catholicism who struggles against the will of the novelist who has created her. Many assumed that this reflected the author's own religious experience and self-consciousness about the business of writing fiction. But before then Muriel Spark had already written autobiographical studies and works of literary criticism, and had determined that she would be first and foremost a poet. Muriel Spark writes about her childhood in Edinburgh (foreigners were tolerated but the English were something quite different); she describes her Jewish father, the original Miss Jean Brodie, her marriage and her time in Africa which was the inspiration for The Go-Away Bird and so much of her early writing. There have been hints in later novels of her work as a publisher's editor (A Far Cry From Kensington), her lodgings in London (The Ballad of Peckham Rye) and her work for the Poetry Society. Now Mrs Spark gives a direct account of the people and places which inspired so much of her work.