James Gillespie's High School

Muriel Spark	Former pupil Muriel Spark is an internationally respected biographer, critic and novelist whose works include The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and A Far Cry from Kensington. Muriel was born in Edinburgh in 1918, the daughter of Bernard and Sarah Camberg. She attended what was then James Gillespie's High School for Girls – a formative time that she considered a most fortunate experience for a future writer. James Gillespie's was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. One teacher in particular, Miss Christina Kay, was the inspiration for Muriel Spark's most famous creation – the Edinburgh schoolmistress Jean Brodie.

This is the class photograph of the Junior Class of James Gillespie's Girls' School in 1930. Muriel Spark is second from the right in the third row from the front. The teacher in the middle of the class is Miss Christina Kay, the model for the fictional Miss Jean Brodie. Although the unconventional fictional character was in some ways unlike her real life model, Muriel felt that Miss Kay 'had it in her, unrealised, to be the character I invented.
Muriel was known as the school's 'poet and dreamer'. '

For further information on Muriel Spark please click here to go to the excellent
National Library of Scotland archive about Muriel Spark >

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