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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark cover

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

Frances Wilson

0

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4

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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark

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.

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Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year
2025
ISBN-13
9780374613211
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Literary biographyMuriel Spark's life and career20th-century literature

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