Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to an indulgent Scottish Jewish father whom she adored, Barney Camberg, and an English mother from an Anglican family, Cissy Uezzell, whose garrulousness and fondness for both pretty clothes and sweetly potent Madeira wine, of which she downed an impressive bottle a day (“my tonic”), left her watchful daughter unbeguiled. Cissy’s tiny and opinionated mother, Adelaide, shared the family’s modest apartment for six enlivening years. She provided a model for—among a splendid gang of subversive grandes dames—Lady Edwina Oliver in Loitering with Intent (1981), one of Spark’s wittiest and most autobiographical novels. Educated at Gillespie’s, the Edinburgh day school to which she later sent her son, Samuel Robin, Muriel was singled out by a warmhearted and art-loving teacher. Christina Kay’s naive attachment to Fascist Italy formed a significant strand in her recreation as the high-spirited Jean Brodie in her brilliant pupil’s sixth and best-known work of fiction, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The future novelist was crowned “Queen of Poetry” at Gillespie’s, where, according to …