In a reversal that will continue throughout her career, Muriel Spark's next three novels veer sharply away from the autobiographical mode of her first two works. The first-person narrator in Robinson is now replaced by a disembodied voice which is literally and figuratively detached from what is going on. As we shall see, each of Spark's books is in dialogue with the others and each zigzags between an unruly past and an indifferent present-day narrator. After initially descending into the world of unrestrained emotions and unconverted history, she now finds refuge behind an impersonal and god-like narrator. Her neo-classical third novel, Memento Mori (1959), could not be further from her life-stories and has come to represent Spark at her most didactic and orthodox. More tightly structured than her first two books, Spark's omniscient story-teller has become cooler, more confident, and removed from the chaos that it recounts. Her fictional universe has also grown smaller, more limited, and gives the illusion of providing a neat slice of life which the reader can easily assimilate. At the same time, Spark disrupts a facile realism by making her work openly fictive so that it can only be judged in its own literary terms. She explains her method as follows:

Memento Mori is, in this fashion, populated almost exclusively with characters over the age of 70. This enables her to create a world that is both self-consciously artificial, in which she can easily insert the supernatural, and yet which also has the ring of truth. As with all of her books, Spark thoroughly researched Memento Mori and spent some time visiting a geriatric ward in a hospital. She dedicates the novel to Teresa Walshe, a Staff Nurse who helped her in this task.