[Muriel Spark's short] stories represent a lesser achievement than her novels, particularly the pieces in … Voices at Play. On the surface this writer possesses all the writing virtues that should make her a master of the short story: she is able in the most crisp and economical prose quickly to develop believable characters and a situation in which the reader is immersed; she is skillful in developing personality through conversation and in finding exactly the right singularity of speech to make a character stand out as a type and as an individual at the same time …; she is also able to handle point of view in any way that suits her, writing as omniscient author or in the character of a person in the story, either in the first person or as a consciousness described rather than describing; finally, she can construct her plots as tightly as her prose and bring them to their conclusions with no wasted effort. Because of these abilities there are no real failures among her stories, but one also feels there are not as many complete successes as there should be…. Perhaps what is at fault is Mrs. Spark's striking cleverness, her utter competence, and occasionally even her willingness to flirt with the supernatural and the incredible. Her stories entertain and sometimes enchant by the presence of a fantastic, strange, or unknown world or scene …, but while they please they are not always moving enough to be memorable.

Of the two volumes, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (1958) clearly has the most memorable pieces. "The Twins," a story about the rather diabolical influence of a very young boy and girl, develops chillingly to its climax as the young woman narrator becomes aware that between the ages of five and twelve these precocious and evil children have gained complete control over their parents and their parents' relations with other people…. This is a story of the triumph of evil over good—and the irony is that the evil comes from two beautiful and apparently guileless children. And there is a further irony: not only does the evil which triumphs over good come from the children; its triumph is largely good's own fault. Mrs. Spark surely means to show that such innocence as that of Jennie and Simon Reeves is not real goodness at all. Because they fail to recognize the evil in their children, they cannot cope with it and therefore do harm and injustice to themselves and their acquaintances. In order to combat evil, Mrs. Spark implies one must know it.

"The Twins" is fairly typical of Mrs. Spark's fiction, for it shows her concern with moral problems, sometimes even with unworldly "influences," her skill at quick characterizations, and her tight prose style. But the best and most compelling of the stories in this volume are the African tales. "The Pawnbroker's Wife," the least ambitious of these tales, is a realistic account of the triumph of a view of life over the real world…. [The] complication of the plot arises out of the stories the mother and daughters invent and force their lodgers to accept in silence to avoid expulsion from the house. "The Pawnbroker's Wife" is an amusing character study that succeeds at the same time in being a portrait edged in pathos. The second African tale, "The Seraph and the Zambesi," indulges Mrs. Spark's penchant for the fantastic…. [It] can be counted this writer's first considerable success…. This is an imaginative, wild and funny tale, quite different from either of the other African stories. In it Mrs. Spark plays with reality, creating her story out of her imagination and what must be scattered remnants of her African experience. (pp. 28-32)

["The Go-Away Bird"] seems to me the finest work of these two volumes of short stories—a haunting and deeply moving account, expressing the tragic loneliness of a human soul not sure of what it wants from life, not finding its kindred spirit or its proper end…. This story shows best the author's eye for the particular detail, her close concern for the events she describes, and her ability to place the reader in a situation and a scene essentially strange to him…. Her style is so spare it is almost flat, yet it serves her very well. (pp. 33-4)

[The Comforters] was admittedly a sort of therapy for Mrs. Spark: by it she was able to work herself out of her state of intellectual ferment and to find herself as a Catholic. She is clearly not on the side of those who accept their faith without retaining independence of thought. (p. 37)

Robinson (1958) is Mrs. Spark's least notable novel. Something of a cross between Robinson Crusoe, a mystery story, and The Lord of the Flies, it reflects the latter work's concern for the moral disintegration of people stranded on an island by an airplane crash, and at the same time it raises the question: who murdered Robinson, the owner of the island? In this novel alone Mrs. Spark uses a first-person narrator, the woman January Marlow, to tell her story. The technique does not work in this novel, for Jan is not merely the onlooker—she is at the center of the action. We are therefore diverted from our concern for the moral disintegration of the characters to concern for the heroine. Even the mystery is fairly transparent. The book's few distinct virtues are Mrs. Spark's competence in the sketching of characters and the presence of a reasonably good adventure plot, whatever the faults of the mystery. (pp. 37-8)

[In the superb Memento Mori] Mrs. Spark raises a serious question—how is one to face death?—and shows how it is answered by a number of very old people. The success of the novel results from two things: the way Mrs. Spark gets inside the minds of very different people, many of them on the verge of senility; and the way she maintains a consistent tone for the novel. The subject is one which could show lapses in taste or seem terribly macabre—death and senility are not pleasant things to consider—but in Mrs. Spark's pages even the unpleasant does not merely disturb, because it is true and it is right. (p. 38)

Memento Mori is surely a small masterpiece. In it for the first time Mrs. Spark has got her theme, her characters, all the techniques of her craft under her control…. The central question of the novel is an important one with universal significance; Mrs. Spark shows that the best way to answer it is with calmness. And, finally, in this rather unusual novel Mrs. Spark's method of presentation is simple and straightforward, and remarkable only in her special way: in this perfectly realistic story Death is a character, as though to emphasize the fact that allegory is not so far from life. (p. 39)

[If] there is anything that keeps one from pronouncing [The Bachelors] Mrs. Spark's finest work it is probably the kind of novel it is and the people in it. For the novel is concerned a good deal of the time with a kind of farcical social comedy …, some rather low people, and some fairly messy proceedings. While Mrs. Spark exhibits compassion for the actors in this drama, she packs her stage with rather a large number of God's most erring children. The novel's accounts of séances (though certainly funny) and the dreary doings of some of the characters may fill the reader with [distaste]…. If the novel is saved from the sordid, it is largely by the portrait of the epileptic Ronald, who sees life with a kind of saddened intensity. Prevented by his flaw from rising to a position for which he is mentally and emotionally fitted, he can only look about him and see a world in which others far more imperfect than he have less difficulty accomplishing their ends, however ignoble…. Ronald's vision of the world informs the novel and invests it with what is its essentially sad dignity. (pp. 41-2)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) is a nearly flawless work, to be ranked with or just behind Memento Mori and The Bachelors. What this novel exhibits is a remarkable technique and a rare polish in style. It also represents a departure for Mrs. Spark in being wholly free of the unworldly and the supernatural. In place of these the novel contains a kind of puzzle or problem, which each reader must solve for himself. (p. 42)

In many ways the reader finds Jean Brodie a wonderfully sympathetic person: she is intelligent, energetic, individualistic, personally attractive; a woman of taste and a challenge to the stuffiness and narrow-mindedness of the people around her. She encourages her girls to think and helps them to enjoy learning. But it gradually becomes clear, as we see her through Sandy's eyes, that she has flaws…. It is in the ambivalence of the portrait of Miss Brodie that Mrs. Spark's skill is best shown, for she emerges a many-sided creature, worthy of all of a reader's attention. (pp. 43-4)

The novel has many other things worth praising besides Miss Brodie's portrait. Particularly interesting is the technique of interweaving past and present time throughout the book. The story progresses in one line from the past, but at the same time bits of information are constantly being introduced to tell what happened later. These bits are like recurring motifs or clues to a mystery, for it is only at the end that their importance for an interpretation of what has happened is clear. (p. 44)