What is so fascinating about Muriel Spark? In the last decade before she died aged 88 in 2006, any interview with the Scottish author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie became an event. The excitement was firstly because she was an artist of the old school, famous not only for her brilliant and complex novels, but also for her unconventional life in Italy, where she lived up a hill with her friend Penelope Jardine, who was also her assistant (and now, in her nineties, her literary executor).
The second attraction was more intangible, but something about Spark, as Frances Wilson says at the start of this new biography, was “spooky” and unknowable, and that is the mystery we were hoping might be solved. Many journalists tried their luck, but Spark toyed with them just as she did with her official biographer, Martin Stannard, who, after 14 years of work, finally published his posthumous book in 2009. It was well-received, but after such a turbulent process there was a feeling that the picture might be incomplete.
