Muriel Spark's most celebrated and best-known novel is undoubtedly The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961 and adapted for stage, TV and film. Set in Edinburgh, the novel tells of the tragic and absurd fates of five schoolgirls under the tutelage of the remarkable Miss Jean Brodie. Stylistically, the novel would mark a departure from conventional story telling. It is characteristically brief, playful, witty and to-the-point. In the first chapter we are told, suddenly, that one of the main protagonists is to die, 'aged twenty-three … in a hotel fire'. Spark's intention is to remove the element of suspense from the novel and to replace the readers' inquisitiveness as to what will happen with an attention as to why things happen. Spark's novels are both profoundly psychological and existential - in that they seek to both uncover personal motivations and to analyse the often unstable nature of private and public truths.

The novel is narrated with considerable humour - a chief characteristic of Spark's writing. But as several commentators have noted, there is a deeply serious undertone to her humour. Jean Brodie is the autocratic, eccentric schoolmistress of the novel's title and her Brodie Set are increasingly inculcated with a brand of 'Brodiesm' that marks them apart from other girls their age. At first they are glad of the distinction. But as they grow older, Miss Brodie's hold over them becomes increasingly ominous and they are drawn into a world of adult games and intrigues. Miss Brodie sends the naive Emily Joyce into a fatal adventure in the Spanish Civil War, she creates outsiders and favourites, manipulates love affairs and imposes her will ruthlessly until she is finally, anonymously betrayed by her most dedicated disciple, Sandy Stranger, who has discovered that Miss Brodie 'thinks she is Providence … thinks she is … God'. Set in the months preceding the Second World War, the novel is an ironic attack upon the nature of dictatorship, the desire for conformity, upon political romanticism and propaganda In this complex and highly original novel Jean Brodie becomes both a symbol for tragic egoism, political despotism and the countless philosophical questions surrounding the authority of God and the nature of ultimate truth.

The Driver's Seat, published in 1970, was billed as 'an ethical shocker'. Stephen Schiff in The New Yorker wrote that Spark's 'spiny and treacherous masterpiece The Driver's Seat is so stark as to be nightmarish.' The book tells the story of Lise, one of life's ordinary misfits, a spinster and an accountant in an anonymous city somewhere in an unnamed country in Northern Europe. Spark famously described The Driver's Seat as a 'whydunnit', alluding to the fact that suspense is removed in the novel's third chapter when the reader is warned that Lise is soon to be the victim of a murder investigation. Characteristically, Spark's novel is an examination, not of what events take place but why they do so.

In a narrative that is deliberately detached, reinforcing Lise's strangeness, and her isolation, the reader eventually learns that the protagonist has suffered years of illness; her behaviour, which is erratic and often confrontational, and her provocative dress are intended almost to alert the world to a previously forgotten existence. Yet despite the fact that Lise desperately seeks acknowledgement she also seeks annihilation ('I wish my parents had practised birth control' she admits towards the end of the novel) and the story is ultimately the tale of a women seeking to control her own death. The Driver's Seat depicts a world in which modern individualism has produced isolation and alienation, in which faddish New Age lifestyles replace genuine spirituality and in which chaos and absurdity replaces the moral certainty of the God-ordered universe. Deprived of these social and spiritual values and existing instead within a small, sterile, impersonal world (symbolised by her spartan, state-of-the-art home), Lise is driven to search, not for her ideal lover but her ideal death. Spark turns the traditional fairytale romance on its head, denying her readership the assurance that modern isolation can be cured by the perfect love affair and instead raising several disturbing questions about the nature of female victimisation and empowerment and about the social, sexual and spiritual values of modern society.