Multifarious Muriel

Twenty years after her death, there’s still much to say about Muriel Spark. And biographers and critics have queued up to do it: Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark, published last year, subverted the genre by declining to follow an orderly narrative. The first volume of Dan Gunn’s two-volume edition of Spark’s letters, also published last year, provides us with her own running commentary on the early years of her career (1944–1963). Now we have James Bailey’s Like a Cat Loves a Bird, an examination of nine aspects of Spark’s life presented in chronological order.