Muriel Spark's previous four novels all include a version of history which helps to disrupt the certainties of the present day. These books alternate between a construction of the past which is literal – as in the traumatic histories of the Second World War in The Hothouse by the East River and Territorial Rights – or otherworldly – as in the idea of the era of the Holy Spirit in The Abbess of Crewe or the new paganism in The Takeover. But whether her view of these originary histories is naturalized or idealized, what is clear is that her fiction is increasingly haunted by the ghosts of the past. Her next three books, Loitering with Intent (1981), The Only Problem (1984) and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), all return Spark to the 1940s and 1950s and to a more intimate sense of her origins. The immediate post-war period, as we have already seen, is part of Spark's prehistory which culminated in her double conversion in 1954 to Roman Catholicism and to the novel form. In more focused and biographical terms than ever before, her novels of the 1980s explore her formation as a writer and the unruly forces which needed to be banished to enable her to create fiction.

Spark's work in the 1970s can be said to have portrayed society, from a disdainful distance, as essentially irredeemable. By this time, she had simply given up on a redemptive narrative which could bring order to the chaos of the contemporary world. In her fiction published in the 1980s, however, her awareness of an abiding sense of disorder is less an external social question than an issue concerning the inner workings of the self. This can be seen principally in relation to the conversionist orthodoxy which was meant to have resolved the confusion inherent in her hybrid identity – part English, part Scottish, part Protestant, part Jewish. Rather than attempt to transcend such contradictions, as she did at the beginning of her career, Spark has begun gradually to relish an untransfigured self. This can be seen, for instance, in Territorial Rights where conversion is, implicitly, no longer an adequate response to a character's Jewishness.