No writer could ever recreate the waspish voice and acerbic wit of Dame Muriel Spark, who died in Florence on April 13 2006 at the age of 88.

Her satirical observations of postwar society have captured the imaginations of generations of readers, thrilled by the vivid narrative and dark undercurrents that mark her work.

Dame Muriel enjoyed tremendous success throughout a career spanning half a century. She received almost every literary award available, including the TS Elliot Award in 1992 and The British Literature Prize in 1997.

Her much-loved work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, remains a contemporary classic and has inspired theatre, film and television adaptations.

Ms Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh on 1 February 1918. She attended James Gillespie’s High School for Girls, which later provided the model for the Marica Blaine School in her best known novel.

At the age of 19, she married Sidney Oswald Spark with whom she had a son, Robin, in 1938. They emigrated to Rhodesia , but the marriage was a disaster and she returned to England in 1944 to work in wartime intelligence.

In 1947, she became editor of the Poetry Review and established herself as a writer of short stories, essays and literary criticism.

Although she had shown an aptitude for writing at an early age, Dame Muriel didn’t discover her voice until relatively late in life. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published at the age of 39, at a time when she was coping with life as a single mother and recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954 marked a pivotal point in her literary career. She later revealed that, for the first time, this enabled her to “see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do”.

She became a prolific writer, publishing almost a novel a year between 1957 and the mid-1970s, alongside short stories, essays and plays.

She remains best-loved for her 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a lively account of a Scottish spinster schoolteacher and her adventures with her "gerrils”.

Dame Muriel’s sense of adventure led her to live on three different continents. After five years of the New York high life, she moved to Rome in 1968. In 2005, she was made an honourary citizen of Tuscany and Italy remained her home until her death.

In 1978, she was elected an honourary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. France awarded her the Commander de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996 and in Britain her services to literature were recognized in 1993, when she was awarded the DBE.

Her private life, however, was scarred by the painful relationship she had with her son, whose controversial conversion to Judaism led to a public feud and estrangement.

She lived with her friend, artist Penelope Jardine, from 1968 until her death.

Dame Muriel famously admonished: “Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full” – and nobody could have recognized their prime more fully.