Electric Spark - by Frances Wilson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The award-winning biographer Frances Wilson presents an exhilarating new look at Muriel Spark, the most consummate artist of the twentieth century.

"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, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

"As good a critic as she is a biographer [and] as sharp a stylist as she is a reader" (The Boston Globe), Frances Wilson brings her enormous, incandescent powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

Advance Praise

"A brilliant, wonderfully shrewd biography, expertly illuminating the most elusive and shape-shifting subject that is Muriel Spark."
--William Boyd, author of The Romantic

"The matchless Muriel Spark has struck upon the perfect literary biographer in Frances Wilson. I suspect Frances Wilson of necromancy--possessed of a sixth sense to read between the lines of mysterious Muriel's life and writing to unearth the unconscious, instinctual and intellectual impulses of her subject's complex creative mind. Electric Spark is simultaneously an enthralling literary biography of the most beguiling literary biographer and a forensic investigation of the story inside the story of Spark's doubled vision and downright spooky life. In prose as sparkling as her subject, Wilson orchestrates the complex movements of Spark's life and writing into a pitch-perfect, electrifying symphony--reconfirming Wilson's pre-eminence as Maestra of British literary biography."
--Rachel Holmes, author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

About the Author

Frances Wilson is a critic and biographer. The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay won the 2012 Elizabeth Longford Prize for historical biography; Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey was longlisted for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize; and Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, winner of the 2022 Plutarch Award, was long-listed for the Bailie Gifford Prize and short-listed for the James Tait Black Award and the Duff Cooper Prize.