Obscured by her reputation as a wit is the fact that Spark was a religious writer—indeed, one of the most important religious writers in modern British literature. She embraced Roman Catholicism in 1954, at age 36, and joined a cohort of renowned literary Catholic converts that included Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. The most consistent influence on her work is the Bible, especially the Old Testament. She began reading it as a girl in her Presbyterian school and kept rereading it throughout her life, less for “religious consolation,” she writes in her essay “The Books I Re-Read and Why,” than “for sheer enjoyment of the literature.” She was particularly drawn to the Book of Job, an anguished outcry against the seeming randomness of evil. And yet her tone throughout her work is so acidly droll, her touch so light and sly, that we could read most of her 22 novels and 41 short stories and never quite process that their central concern is God.