Muriel Spark (1918- ), a Catholic convert of Jewish descent and Scottish birth shows a pressing commitment to moral issues and to their relation to fiction form.(1) Her novels mark new advances in the British fiction. She is considered one of the giants of twentieth-century fiction. John Updike describes her in The New Yorker as "one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering- as well as feeding the fiction machine". With her numerous works, which include: The Comforters (1951), Memento Mori (1959), and The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), she joins two great traditions of the English novel: that of comedy of manners (similar to Jane Austen); and that of romantic-gothic fiction from the Brontes and Mary Shell.(2) Being a poet, her fictional style is characterized by "conciseness and precision".