The prime failure of Miss Jean Brodie

Newly released letters reveal full bitter extent of author Muriel Spark’s rift with the son she turned her back on

‘You aren’t a child. You have to accept FACTS’

SHE will forever be remembered for her creation of an impassioned woman whose uncompromising spirit ultimately leads to tragedy in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.

But the private life of Scottish novelist Muriel Spark was marked by emotional drama every bit the equal of the tale filmed with Maggie Smith.

While Spark was showered with plaudits and literary success, her stormy relationships led to a fallingout with her son Robin that became public in the 1990s.

Now previously unseen correspondence, acquired by the National Library of Scotland, reveals the full extent of the feud, and traces its roots to decades earlier, to when she turned her back on Robin – born in 1938 – after she divorced his manic depressive father and left him to live with his grandparents aged just seven in Edinburgh.

By the 1960s, the fiercely ambitious Spark was dividing her time between America and Italy, and she warned Robin that he was spending too much time listening to friends, who accused her of abandoning him.

She wrote that she couldn’t face meeting with her bitter son, by then in his early 20s, on a visit to Britain.

She said: ‘I don’t see any way to promise a visit to Edinburgh dear, because to be frank my self-respect and health as well as my nature demand an atmosphere of consistent friendliness and I would have to be absolutely sure there would be no more unpleasantness and abuse.’

In a letter dated 1966, she insisted she was too busy to attend Robin’s wedding. She wrote: ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly come all that way back in March – I would risk upsetting my US residency permit and tax arrangements, even if I could afford the expense and the time off work.’

In the mid-1990s, reports emerged that Spark and her son had fallen out after the author publicly questioned whether she was Jewish. Her claims that her maternal grandmother may have been a gentile infuriated her son, himself an Orthodox Jew.

But the letters show that mother and son had first clashed over the issue years earlier. In a note dated 1981, Spark told her son: ‘You aren’t a young girl and you aren’t a child. If you don’t like FACTS you still have to accept them…

‘Nobody is saying you are not a Jew or that I have no Jewish origins. You can be whatever you like… But there is no use writing to me with all that pompous bureaucratic religiosity as if you were [Scottish Protestant leader] John Knox in drag.’

A clearly furious Robin wrote: ‘I cannot correspond with you further.’

In 2003, the relationship broke down for good and they exchanged their final letters. On July 8, Robin told her he was heartbroken by her ‘offensive and hurtful remarks’.

But an unrepentant Spark accused him of being one of those ‘pitiable people who have no sense of humour’.

Spark’s biographer, Professor Martin Stannard, last night said she probably resented her son because he reminded her of her husband.

Robin declined to comment last night on the letters. He said: ‘The past is the past.’

Muriel Spark died at the age of 88 in April 2006 and did not leave her son anything in her will. Her literary executor, the sculptor Penelope Jardine, with whom she lived for more than 30 years, was unavailable for comment.