Spark died on Thursday in a hospital in Florence, said Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor of the Tuscan village of Civitella della Chiana, where Spark had lived for almost three decades.

Spark wrote more than 20 novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She had lived in Italy since the late 1960s, first in Rome and later in a converted 13th-century church in Tuscany with her friend of many years, painter and sculptor Penelope Jardine.

But she retained the accent of her birth and youth in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended James Gillespie's High School for Girls and was taught by the prototype for her most famous character - Miss Jean Brodie.

That 1961 book, later adapted for a very successful theatrical play and movie, made her famous internationally. But she already had written seven novels, three volumes of poetry and, since 1950, had been producing respected biographical and critical work about the Brontë family, Mary Shelley and John Masefield.

The Girls of Slender Means, considered by many to be her best novel, was published in 1963, drawing on her experience as a young woman struggling to make ends meet while writing in London.