Frances Wilson (right), with Rachel Holmes chairing, gave a compelling talk at Maggs Bros about her biography Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (Bloomsbury). The audience heard about, among other things, Spark’s ‘spookiness’ – ‘Everything that happened to her, she’d written about’; about the recurrence in her life and work of people with the initials MS; about her breakdown, during which she believed that TS Eliot was sending her coded messages in Greek anagrams in his poetry, as well as breaking into her flat; and of her vast personal archive, all of it distilled in her short, ‘perfect’ novels.
