The author of twenty-two acclaimed novels and nearly as many other books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, and autobiography, the late Muriel Spark was not widely known as an essayist. Before her death in 2006 she asked her close friend and literary executor Penelope Jardine to put together a collection of her essays, reviews, journalism, broadcasts, speeches, and the odd pensée for publication. Jardine claims to have based her selection on standards of weight and consequence: While Spark reviewed books for the London Observer for a decade, for example, her executor deems all these ephemeral pieces too slight for inclusion. But many of the works she did see fit to include are themselves undeniably slight, leading the reader to conclude that critical journalism was not Spark’s forte. The selections are divided into four sections: Life, Literature, Miscellany, and Faith (Spark, by birth half-Jewish and half-Protestant, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1954).

The resulting volume is slim, fewer than 300 pages, and its quality is uneven to say the least. It would seem that Spark, one of the most concentrated and lethal novelists of the twentieth century, was not much of an essayist. And perhaps this should not be surprising. As a fiction writer she tended to hover godlike above her creations, regarding them sub specie aeternitatis; as Christopher Ricks wrote doubtfully, when Spark was at the height of her career, “perhaps when man proposes, God disposes with as cool a disposition as Miss Spark’s.” This might