Frances Wilson Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted?  

I’ve been smiling since I was told the news – it’s such a happy surprise and a very great honour, not least because of the calibre of the judges and the other books on the list. Richard Holmes has been my lodestar for thirty years, and so to find myself alongside him means everything.  

What was it about Spark that inspired to you write about her?

I was initially drawn by her own interest in biography, which many readers do not know about. Before she became a novelist, Spark was a biographer herself, with trenchant views about the genre. She then, to the horror of her friends, invited a biographer (Martin Stannard) to research her life, and responded to his drafts as though he were blackmailing her. Because Spark had a genius for plots and knew exactly what she was about, I felt that she was playing a game with Stannard, and set out to explore what that game might be.

What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

A renewed enthusiasm for Spark as an artist, together with an understanding of her originality, courage, and sheer spookiness.  I hope also to draw attention to the body of work beyond the novels: her short stories, literary criticism, and groundbreaking biography of Mary Shelley (Spark was the first person to treat Frankenstein as a work of literature rather than a script for a horror film). Overall, I hope readers will feel the force of her creative energy, and finish the book as thrilled – and as terrified – by Spark as I am.  

What was the most surprising discovery you made while researching?

Without giving away all my secrets, I suggest that Spark was a spy during the war. She was living in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and probably recruited by the Security and Intelligence Bureau in Bulawayo (known as XB)  to identify enemy aliens. She said very little about these years, other than that ‘In Africa you lead a double life.’ This might explain why her writing is so filled with spies and spying, and why, when she had a breakdown in her mid-thirties, she believed that T.S. Eliot, her mentor, was spying on her.  

You describe Electric Spark as ‘not strictly a biography’. What led you to take this unconventional approach?

I wanted to write a ‘Sparkian’ biography, in the sense of a book which was true to her spirit. Electric Spark is a decoding as well as an interpretation: Spark liked to have ‘fun and games’ with her readers, laying traps and planting puzzles and blending facts with fiction. She also, in her vast archives, left her biographers a paper trail of instructions which I followed as best I could. The result is a book which goes off the beaten track and into the realms of her imagination.  

How did Spark’s relationships – particularly with her son, Robin, and her assistant, Penelope Jardine, shape her public and private selves?

Spark’s relationship with Robin was a private tragedy. She was brazen about him in public (‘he’s been nothing but one big bore’)  but the breakdown in relations clearly shattered her. Robin was raised by her parents in Edinburgh while she tried to establish herself as a writer in London; she sent him money all his life, but did not form a maternal bond. ‘Soft’ domestic setups, Spark believed, were destructive of art, and had she nurtured Robin there would have been no books.  There are no maternal bonds in her novels, and no happy families, but Penelope Jardine, whom Spark met in her fifties and lived with until her death, made her writing life possible. Collaboration was vital to Spark, and Penelope was her chief collaborator.

If you could describe your book in three words, what would they be?

Playful, peculiar, possessed