On the announcement of a competition for a memorial to Muriel Spark in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, Herald columnist Rosemary Goring applauds this long-overdue decision.

In 1962, as Easter approached, Muriel Spark sat in her room in the North British Hotel in Edinburgh – now the Balmoral – waiting for the visiting hours at the Royal Infirmary, where her father lay dying. Years later in the essay “What Images Return” she reflected on that limbo, during which she spent most of the day sitting on the window ledge, looking out on the Castle Rock, the Old Town, and the east end of Princes Street Gardens. It was a painful, introspective time. Not only did she dearly love her father but, for various reasons, she could not stay with her mother in Bruntsfield and instead was lodging in a place “meant for strangers”.

To some extent, though, she too was by now something of a stranger to her home city. “Edinburgh,” she wrote, “is the place that I, a constitutional exile, am essentially exiled from.” Nevertheless – one of her favourite words – she was deeply attached to the capital, where she had spent her first 18 years. It was a period that, in hindsight, would probably qualify as the happiest days of her life.

While her father drew his last breaths, Spark contemplated the country of her birth,........

© Herald Scotland