Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
Jun 2025 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
432
Pages
infoThis book will become available on June 5, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
*A 2025 HIGHLIGHT FOR: Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer and Scotsman*
'Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back' KATHERINE RUNDELL
'Miraculous . . . It is hard to imagine a more richly enjoyable literary biography' A. N. WILSON
From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.
'Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is' Muriel Spark
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as 'Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.
Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.
'Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back' KATHERINE RUNDELL
'Miraculous . . . It is hard to imagine a more richly enjoyable literary biography' A. N. WILSON
From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.
'Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is' Muriel Spark
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as 'Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.
Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.
About the author
Frances Wilson is a critic, journalist and the author of six works of non-fiction, including The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2012, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016, and Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, which won the Plutarch Award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. She lives in North London with her daughter.
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