IT might just be the table at which Muriel Spark wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Then again, it might not.

But Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull still expects to fetch up to £400 for the item at a sale next week.

It forms part of a 12-lot collection taken from the estate of the author’s estranged son Robin Spark and was previously in the Bruntsfield home of his grandparents.

Spark spent six weeks working on her most famous novel there before its publication in 1961, and is thought to have sat at this table as she wrote it.

The auction will also include books signed and dedicated to Robin by his mother. The pair became estranged after she converted to Catholicism, while Robin embraced Judaism. The two disagreed on whether Muriel’s mother had been Jewish.