In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Frances Wilson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
- How Muriel Spark’s first 39 turbulent years provided the raw material for her fiction.
- Frances Wilson’s discovery of Spark’s games, puzzles and anagrams, including the invented ‘doppelganger’, Nita McEwen, whose name conceals the chilling phrase, Twin Menace.
- Wilson structured Electric Spark around Spark’s ‘four Marys’ and the Scottish ballad tradition, tracing how Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Shelley, Mary Stranger and Marie Stopes shaped Spark’s imagination.
- The spooky permeability between life and art: Spark’s belief she lived in the future tense, her ‘evil eye’ and the uncanny way events in her novels repeatedly echoed in her own life.
- How during her four-month sprint writing Electric Spark, Wilson could feel Spark’s hand on her own, mirroring Spark’s own accounts of tuning into ‘voices in the air’.
- The ethical and imaginative challenges of writing biography about an inveterate trickster: reading between the lines of Curriculum Vitae and Loitering with Intent, embracing contradiction, and accepting that any life of Spark can only ever offer one powerful version of the truth, if at all.
