Electric Spark - by Frances Wilson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

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

"Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is," said Muriel Spark.

Muriel 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." By 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. It takes us through her early years, when turmoil reigned: 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 her experiences in the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically distilled, 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), in Electric Spark Frances Wilson brings her enormous, incandescent powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

"Incisive and captivating."
--The Washington Post (Best Works of Nonfiction of the Year)

"Frances Wilson, the ingenious biographer of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas de Quincey, and D. H. Lawrence . . . nimbly and exhilaratingly [shows] Spark was a true artist, a natural, set apart from the common run."
--Leo Robson, Bookforum

"[Muriel Spark's] spirit crackles, like the lightning that fascinated her, throughout Frances Wilson's new biography . . . Electric Spark is a darting, innovative example of the form . . . The biographer's own surveillance is through a magnifying glass, and her book is a fire starter."
--Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

"A deeply intelligent, captivating and passionate work that reminds us of everything a literary biography can and should be."
--Jessica Ferri, The Washington Post

"A brilliant literary critic and chronicler turns her sharp-eyed attention to the life and works of Muriel Spark, a writer of odd and compelling genius herself. Sure to be one of the most compelling biographies of the year, if not decade."
-Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe (Best Fall Books)

"In [Electric Spark], Frances Wilson revels in her sublimely contrary subject . . . Wilson borrows Spark's own mystical whimsy about the relationship between her life and her work."
--Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

"Biography, then--which Frances Wilson attempts in this beautifully written book--is the closest readers can get to Spark . . . 'Sparkian' has not entered common parlance but, by the time you finish this brilliant book, you think it probably should."
--The Economist

"Excellent . . . [Electric Spark offers] an enlightening account of [Spark's] formative experiences . . . Wilson presents the whole case file with skill, leaving it to the reader to decide what they make of such an enigmatic character. The biography is also a welcome reminder to return to a gloriously talented novelist."
--Martin Chilton, The Independent

"So original and engaging . . . The result of this blend of existing sources and fresh archival finds is an unputdownable and 'electric' perspective on the extraordinary talent and life events that together forged Spark's fiction . . . A fabulous achievement, in more than one sense."
--Isabel Berwick, Financial Times

"[Wilson's] books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam--and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject."
--Rachel Cooke, The Observer

"A canny biography of the early career of this strange, brilliant novelist."
--Olivia Laing, The Guardian

"A joyously, brilliantly intelligent work of biography. In Wilson, Spark has met her true match."
--Anne Enright, author of The Wren, the Wren

"A brilliant, wonderfully shrewd biography that expertly illuminates the most elusive and shape-shifting subject that is Muriel Spark."
--William Boyd, author of Gabriel's Moon

"Treachery, lies, fantasy, God, everlastingly unsatisfactory sexual relationships. This miraculous narrative unravels the creative process of a brilliant novelist."
--A. N. Wilson, author of Goethe: His Faustian Life

"The matchless Muriel Spark has struck upon the perfect literary biographer in Frances Wilson. 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 preeminence as maestra of British literary biography."
--Rachel Holmes, author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

About the Author

Frances Wilson is a critic, a journalist, and the author of several works of nonfiction, including How to Survive the Titanic; or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography; Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize; and Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, which won the Plutarch Award, was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Award, and was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize.