Muriel Spark, a Scottish-born genius writer of funny novels, experienced time in two ways, “clock time” or chronological events. She wrote of Proust, the he “regarded Time subjectively, and realised that the whole of eternity is a present now”.

Frances Wilson’s biography reflects Spark a puzzle, and so tto 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”. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to decipher her code.

The book begins in Edinburgh, where Muriel Camberg (born 1918) grew up, and where Spark’s most famous book. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is set and ends more or less with publication of her debut novel, The Comforters, in 1957. Sparks cynical outlook is apt for this volatile political era, as increasing number of people are turning to religion, astrology and other unseen realms, in a bid to make sense of “clock time” or transcend it. 

Spark married young and went to live in Africa with her unstable husband, Ossie; they had a son, Robin, who was mainly brought up Muriel’s mother in Edinburgh. She got divorced, was probably a spy for a while, and returned to England for war work in a unit dedicated to deceiving Germans with black propaganda, via radio shows and counterfeit newspaper articles “True with believable lies”.

Her professional and personal life in London in the 1940s and 1950s  including Spark’s conversion to Catholicism in 1954, which freed her creatively to become a novelist which allowed her to decouple from clock time. “She liked the saints, angels, miracles and mysteries, and the fact that, for Catholics “anything can happen to anyone” Wilson writes.

Muriel was steeped in the Edinburgh myths of her childhood, and in the Border Ballads, those strange tales of murder, witchcraft and dopelgängers, she became fixated on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, She believed in angels, she “cast a spell on a manuscript before putting it in the post”. She was blackmailed by her former lover Derek Sanford stole 70 letters, including love letters, from her house and sold them to an American rare-book dealer, who invited her to buy them back for $1,500 in 1963 which Spark refused to pay up. Wilson had access to Spark’s voluminous personal archives, “organised in box files… equivalent in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool”. According to Wilson, Spark’s entire literary output, including all her novels, stories, biographies and editions of the letters of Charlotte Bronté, Mary Shelly and Cardinal Newman, takes up “a mere two feet on my bookshelves”. “ Most of the men in Muriel’s social circle felt towards her a similar combination of desire and hate. Muriel did not experience the slow drip of soft misogyny as she proved herself, again and again, the superior of her male contemporaries, she stood beneath its iron-hard rain”, Wilson writes.

Spark’s life generated a rich seam of puzzles, blackmail, the supernatural, books within books, spies, grievances and betrayal she later used in her fiction. Judas-like Sandy Stranger betrays the beloved teacher Jean Brodie, and, later, Sandy becomes a nun.

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury £25, 432 pages.