Edinburgh has more statues of animals than women - now that's changing

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, and her reasons for leaving. As a young woman determined to become a writer, she felt she could never be understood here, even though, when she was a pupil at James Gillespie’s School for Girls, she had been feted “as a poet and dreamer”. Despite her spectacular career as a novelist, she recognised that she had enjoyed a charmed beginning to her creative life: “I have never since quite accustomed myself to the world’s indifference to art and the process of art, and to the special needs of artists.”

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Now, I am delighted to learn, almost two decades after Spark’s death, Edinburgh is finally to acknowledge her stature as one of the country’s - indeed one of the world’s - finest writers. Later this month, a competition will be launched to create a memorial to her to be erected next year in East Princes Street Gardens. It will stand within sight of the hotel room where she grieved for her father. Thanks to the generosity of the enlightened Edinburgh benefactors Morag and James Anderson,

Spark’s memory will be kept alive for generations to come as locals and visitors stroll through the gardens, or picnic beneath its spreading trees to the soundtrack of trains rumbling in and out of Waverley Station. And what better place, close to the Scott Monument, which honours another of Scotland’s literary giants. Sir Walter Scott, along with Robert Louis Stevenson and Spark, form a formidable triumvirate of talent.

As yet we have no idea what shape the memorial will take. It might be a figurative statue of Spark or one of her literary characters – that, in Corstorphine, to Robert Louis Stevenson’s heroes Alan Breck and David Balfour is a favourite of mine; or it might be something conceptual, in keeping with Spark’s love of the avant-garde. Regardless of its design, what matters most is that a writer of such distinction is at last being given her due in her homeland.

This is not just long-overdue for Spark, but for women in Scotland as a whole. Their systematic airbrushing from the historical record has been so brazen it should be a source of national shame. In Edinburgh alone the representation of women in public art is pitiful; it would be amusing if it were not so serious – and symbolic - an omission. At present there are 79 statues to men – from Abraham Lincoln and Robert the Bruce to Enlightenment figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith.

Maggie Smith, on-set of the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Image: JT Vintage / Getty)

There are, incredibly, 15 statues of animals, but only eight of women. Not even Mary, Queen of Scots has merited a statue worthy of her status. There is a figure in a niche visible only to sea-gulls on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery and another on the Scott Monument.

A plan earlier this year to put a ninth woman on a plinth – Dr Elsie Inglis - was given the green light, but while it looks set to go ahead, it has been mired in unedifying controversy. But it’s time to talk about Muriel.

Hers is an extraordinary, inspirational story, and nobody better deserves to be commemorated in the city centre. Born in 1918 into a humble family – her father Barney Camberg was a mechanical engineer – she left Edinburgh for Rhodesia, where she married Sydney Oswald Spark, with whom she had a son, Robin. When the marriage ended, she left Robin with her parents in Edinburgh, and worked in London, sending money home for her child, her parents and her estranged husband.

At times it was a desperate struggle to make her way as a single woman in the piranha tank of literary London, but she learned how to stand up for herself and – just as importantly – never to doubt her talent. In time her writing earned her international fame. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a runaway success, but she was to write many equally brilliant novels, among them Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means and A Far Cry from Kensington. And, while she only returned to Edinburgh for brief spells, she retained her love for it to the end.

Those of us who attended her sell-out event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival a couple of years before her death will never forget the warmth and affection with which she was received by the city that claimed her as their own. Her obvious delight in her homecoming was profoundly moving. As she read from The Prime - her Bruntsfield vowels unchanged despite decades of living in Italy - there were few dry eyes in the house.

One of many misconceptions about Spark is that, since she chose to live abroad, she was not enamoured of Scotland. While it is true that she had been eager to leave, to broaden her experience and find the perfect circumstances in which to write, it is also true that her first 18 years informed everything she did. In her own phrase, she was - and always would be – “Scottish by formation”. This was evidenced in the way she thought, spoke and expressed herself.

If the winner of the competition for her memorial can capture the essence of that spirit, they will have done Spark, and Scotland, proud.

Rosemary Goring is a columnist and author. Her latest book is Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots