ROME, April 15: Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark, best known for her book, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, has died in Italy at the age of 88 and was buried in Tuscany on Saturday.

“She was very open. Both fascinating and down-to-earth at the same time. Her loss will be very difficult to overcome,” Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor of the little Italian town where she lived, said.

Spark wrote 24 novels, several short stories and three well-received biographies during her long career.

But she shot to fame with her 1962 fictional work, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, a tense novel about a young teacher stirring thoughts of emancipation at an Edinburgh girls’ school in staid society between the two world wars. The book was made into a critically acclaimed film starring Maggie Smith in 1969.

A self-styled ‘experimentalist’, she was hailed as being far ahead of her time both in her style of writing and the subjects she chose, using her sharp satire to expose pettiness and vanity pervading all facets of life and death.

In the 1959 novel, ‘Memento Mori’ she wrote: “Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”

Spark died on Friday in a hospital in Florence after battling health problems since last year.—Reuters