Review: The mysterious Muriel Spark

The writer Muriel Spark was famous for her acerbic wit, stylistic elegance and formal experimentation. Canny and evasive, she fascinated biographers and critics alike but carefully controlled her image. When her former lover and collaborator, Derrick Stanford, published the first full critical biography of her in 1963, it infuriated her.

In 1993, to correct the record, she undertook a stripped-down autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. Though she also authorized the poet Martin Stannard to be her new biographer and granted him access to her massive archive, her objections to his drafts meant that his biography was not published until 2010, four years after her death. Now Frances Wilson, a fine stylist herself, as well as an enterprising researcher and venturesome critic, has written a provocative new study of Spark’s life packed with the kind of details, puzzles and wordplay that Spark revered. 

Electric Spark focuses on the first 39 years of Spark’s life, leading to her first novel, The Comforters. This is the same timeframe as Curriculum Vitae. Wilson reads that work, as she says, “between the lines,” interested in how the “books clarify [the] life,” as Spark put it. Combing through fiction for biography, however, is a risky business (it was a hanging offense in the mid-century years, when New Criticism dominated literary study). 

Wilson’s readings of Spark’s work are often seductive, sometimes reductive. In her analysis, for example, Spark’s story “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” becomes an equation (“Sybil the prophetess represents Muriel” and “Barry is of course Stanford”). It is true that Spark often wrote allegory (Wilson even calls Aiding and Abetting “unconscious allegory”), but the emphasis on personal equivalencies sometimes elides Spark’s bigger concerns: the mystery of suffering, the presence of evil. Wilson’s claim that her characters have “no inner lives or intelligible motivation” ignores the religious and philosophical seeking that so many of them undertake.

Spark was born Muriel Camberg in 1918 to a working-class, nonobservant, partly Jewish Edinburgh family and later referred to herself as a “Gentile Jewess.” She was a literary creature from childhood. She received prizes for her precocious poetry but, because her family was poor, never attended university. She chose the marriage route out of her parents’ crowded home and travelled to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to marry Ossie Spark, whom she had met in Edinburgh.

In Africa, she gave birth to a son, Robin, but soon fled her husband’s mental instability and violent threats, supporting herself and her son as a secretary. Finding Rhodesia stultifying, not least because of its appalling racism, she was determined to return to Great Britain, even though World War II still raged and civilian travel was nearly impossible. With a little subterfuge, she managed passage on a troopship, leaving Robin in the care of his Dominican convent school.

The “Africa” section of Electric Spark is especially provocative for its leaps of imagination. Because so little is known about Spark’s movements in Rhodesia after she left her husband, Wilson surmises that she “probably” spent this period spying for the United Kingdom. Well, maybe. 

Wilson also believes that Spark invented Nita McEwan, a character who appears in Spark’s Curriculum Vitae as a childhood acquaintance—one with a striking resemblance to Muriel. In the autobiography, Spark claimed to see McEwan again in Rhodesia, only to learn of her murder at the hands of her husband. It was an event that, in Spark’s telling, hastened her own flight from marriage. Because Wilson can find no documentation of Nita McEwan or the murder, she believes that Spark conjured up a fictional double. This is intriguing, if not exactly definitive.

However unreal Nita McEwan was, Wilson is especially good on the period near the end of World War II when we know Spark was recruited to intelligence work. Her new mission reinforced her interest in the wordplay, deceit and spying that would find its way into her fiction. After Robin finally arrived in Edinburgh, Spark’s parents became his permanent caretakers—Spark’s efforts to secure suitable housing in London for them both failed. In later years, after Robin committed to the Jewish identity he felt his mother had denied, their estrangement became public.

In the meantime, Spark used her poetry and her administrative skills to immerse herself in London’s peacetime literary world. As editor of the Poetry Review and general secretary of the Poetry Society in 1947-48, she presided over political infighting that provided her with great comic fodder. When traditionalists forced her out of the Poetry Society, Spark established herself as a biographer, publishing studies of Emily Brontë (coauthored with Stanford) and Mary Shelley. 

Wilson quotes Spark to excellent effect. About the city of her birth, for example, she reminds us of Spark’s line: “Edinburgh people were either sane, eccentric, or plain mad; they were not neurotic.” As a satirist (hence a moralist), Spark was prone to many such grand generalizations, and so is Wilson. For example, placing her subject in the context of modernism, Wilson writes that Spark “wrote sentences as glinting as Hemingway’s, but instead of suggesting an undertow of meaning she eliminated altogether the impression of depth.” 

This is baffling. Spark was clearly influenced by modernism and the nouveau roman, or new novel, with its chronological experimentation and emphasis on describing the physical world rather than ideas and emotions. But in her light comic tone she nonetheless arranged suggestive imagery and religious allusion that gathered force in satisfying opposition to her wry narrative voice. 

In The Girls of Slender Means, for instance, an elocutionist’s repetition of lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the recitation of psalms at the book’s climax and the religious conversion of a crucial character all certainly suggest depth (as, ultimately, does an unlikely symbol, a Schiaparelli dress). Likewise, in Memento Mori, Spark signals the seriousness of her comic design from the beginning, in her epigraph from the Penny Catechism on the last four things: “Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.” Such examples abound.

Wilson does treat Spark’s conversion, first to Christianity in 1953 and then to Catholicism a year later, with serious attention. She respects Spark’s refusal to succinctly sum up the “why” of that conversion and is excellent on the centrality of Cardinal Newman’s writing to Spark’s search for meaning. Newman’s line, “Religious light is intellectual darkness,” grants Spark’s conversion the mystery of its complexity. 

Newman’s devotion to clear, simple language and to “writing as thinking and thinking as praying” appealed to a writer like Spark whose life had been full of upheaval. Her conversion preceded her own crackup, brought on in Spark’s telling by the Dexedrine she took to diet. Wilson’s account of the breakdown, with its distortions of language and time, is fascinating. By weird coincidence, Evelyn Waugh had during the same period experienced a similar breakdown. As Spark wrote The Comforters, the novel ignited by her experience, Waugh worked on his own autobiographical version, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s support for the competition was a crucial boost.

Wilson’s Afterword reminds us of Spark’s later years in New York, from 1962 to 1966, where she was finally rich and famous. She fully earned her reputation as difficult and could even be vicious: In an interview, she called her son “one big bore.” She regularly quarreled with friends, editors and agents. Her final move was to Italy, where she found the most stable friendship of her life, with Penelope Jardine. She was an art student who offered to be Spark’s secretary and became companion and collaborator. Jardine gave Spark sympathy, order and a home where she continued to write strong, startling novels well into old age.  

One of the pleasures of Wilson’s summing up is her examination of the biographer’s challenges, literary and ethical, in portraying such a complex character, one constantly reinventing herself. Because Wilson is such an ambitious and lively writer, committed to digging deep, Electric Spark is engaging throughout. The force and clarity of her arguments, however debatable, do her subject the literary justice she deserves. Dissatisfied as she was with most of what was written about her, however, Spark would probably disagree.

This article appears in November 2025.

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