Review / Electric Spark by Frances Wilson

 

Electric Spark

by Frances Wilson

In life, Muriel Spark was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.

Obituaries / Emma Tennant

 Emma Tennant described herself as ‘a ventriloquist’ and ‘a feminist – among other things’: her books often featured the bifurcated lives of women. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

Emma Tennant obituary

Satirical novelist who depicted Britain in a state of decay

Frances Wilson

Tue 31 Jan 2017

Emma Tennant, who has died aged 79, was the author of a remarkable procession of novels, which appeared at the rate of more or less one a year between 1973 and 2016. Tennant’s voice – satanic, subversive, sly, unclouded – was unique in British fiction: a satirist in the Swiftian vein, she depicted a Janus-faced nation in a state of decay. In The Beautiful Child (2012), her spin on The Turn of the Screw, Tennant described the ouija board used by Henry James’s secretary as “the Outernet, the great web beyond the stars where the dead can communicate with the living”. The Outernet was also Tennant’s terrain, as a ghostwriter of sorts. Her first novel, The Colour of Rain (1964), was written under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy, a name chosen by the manipulations of a ouija board, and her subsequent novels called up the spirits of Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg, Emily Brontë and Henry James himself.