Electric Spark by Frances Wilson review: 'illuminating and enjoyable'

This well-researched biography of Muriel Spark offers fresh insights into her life and work, writes Allan Massie

Almost 50 years ago I wrote a small book about Muriel Spark for a small Edinburgh Press. It was a study of her novels, and she liked, or at least quite liked it, partly because there was almost nothing of a biographical nature - she had a high sense of her right to privacy. Later, we became friendly. I met her when she came to Edinburgh with her friend Penelope Jardine, and she invited me to visit them at their Italian home, an invitation I never took up. Much later she selected a biographer, Martin Stannard, whose biography of Evelyn Waugh she had found good, but the relationship wasn't happy and she disliked his book. Now, 20 years after her death, there is a new, rich and well researched biography by Frances Wilson.

Muriel Spark pictured in 1960 | Getty Images

It is intelligent and for the most part both illuminating and enjoyable, although I don't suppose Spark would have liked it either. Though the novels are discussed, a few in detail, many are more or less ignored, only those drawing more immediately on her life getting extensive treatment.

The story of her childhood and youth in Edinburgh will be well known to Scotsman readers. It was the city that formed her and she wrote her novels in an Edinburgh tone of voice. She never lived in the city after her early and unhappy marriage, which took her to what was then Rhodesia, yet you still heard the Edinburgh tone. She said she wrote her novels on the "nevertheless" principle: that may be so; nevertheless it may not.

The marriage broke up and in 1944 she returned to Britain, leaving her four year-old son Robin in a convent. She retrieved him after the war and took him to Edinburgh to be brought up by her parents. She supported his care, from her meagre earnings, but they were never close and in her late years there was a very public quarrel when Robin was angered by her insistence that she wasn't entirely Jewish. Wilson discusses this sad business fairly and at length.

Muriel Spark in 1983 | Getty Images

In London, Spark worked first in a department of the Foreign Office which dealt with counter-espionage. Wilson says she was actively engaged in this herself, but, since she worked there for only the last months of the war, I have my doubts. What is certain, however, is that spies of one sort or another feature repreatedly in her novels. The subject fascinated her. She had a magpie's eye for possibilities.

For some years she collaborated with her lover Derek Stanford on biographies and criticism. They talked of marriage, but fell out. Then she wrote her first novel, The Comforters, highly praised by Evelyn Waugh. She was on her way. Others followed in quick succession, notably The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, though my own favourite of these early books is Memento Mori.

Wilson pays a lot of attention to the split with Stanford and the memoirs he wrote which infuriated Spark. I never knew Stanford, though for some years we shared fiction reviewing duties in the Scotsman. Robert Nye, our lead reviewer, said he was "a nice old thing."

Spark’s success was remarkable. Rather like Byron, she rose in the morning and found herself famous.

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, by Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury Circus, £25

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