Hello, you've made it to the back of the book, your new favorite arts and culture podcast. I'm your host, Chris Scalia, a senior fellow at the American

Enterprise Institute. My guest for this episode is Francis Wilson. Dr. Wilson is a critic,

journalist, and the author of six works of nonfiction, including several literary biographies.

Her newest book is Electric Spark, The Enigma of Dame Muriel Spark.

Francis, welcome to the back of the book. Thank you so much for having me, Chris.

Well, it's great to have you here, and I'm very excited for this conversation, because A, I love the book, and B, Muriel Spark is one of my favorite

novelists. As we were just saying, before we started recording, she's a fascinating person and a

great novelist, so there's no shortage of things to talk about here. But for the listeners who

may not be familiar with her, and I have to say,

I'm surprised by how many people have never heard of Muriel Spark. So let's take those people

into account. Before we get into the details of her life, especially her formative years,

why should people have heard of Muriel Spark? Well, I think it's very sad that people don't know Spark immediately now. And

one of the reasons I wrote this book was to kind of reignite, let's use the image,

reignite kind of Sparks readership, because she absolutely must not be forgotten. She must not go out of print.

She must not be forgotten because she was such a central figure of the mid-20th century

literary scene in England and America.

And she has left bits of her sparkle everywhere.

So she was Scottish. She was,

she was born in Edinburgh and the Scots are incredibly proud of her because they claim, I think

rightly, that all of her, her witchiness and her humor and her sense of kind of the world as full of doubles and doppelgangers was entirely born of kind of Scottish ballads, the border ballads.

So she was Scottish down to her, down to her bone marrow. But she left Scotland

when she was 19 in 1937 and went to, went first to Africa, where she spent most of the war,

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