When Muriel Spark was editor of Poetry Review, and long before she became famous, she was keen to promote a new method of literary criticism, using charts, tables and the careful expunging of ‘personal reactions’. She hoped that this might allow a quasi-scientific ‘true critical standard’ to emerge, discourage the publication of bad poetry and regulate interpretation of the good stuff. This eccentric suggestion was typical of a woman often bent on controlling other people’s critical instincts.

In her later years, Spark said she wanted her whole archive to be available to scholars and biographers posthumously, ‘however badly [it] reflected on my personal or professional reputation’. She tried, however, to censor and suppress the work of her appointed biographer, Martin Stannard, who had been given access to it. Stannard was surprised by how much Spark’s Tuscan study resembled a business office, with its hundreds of densely packed and meticulously arranged box files. Spark compulsively hoarded ‘almost every document that passed through her hands’, according to Dan Gunn. She also kept carbon copies of her own letters and faxes. She wrote in her autobiography (a singularly unrevealing one) that she thought of this archive as ‘silent, objective evidence of truth, should I ever need it’.

Two fascinating new books, both centred on the first half of Spark’s life, show that Spark was obsessively concerned about her work and reputation. Frances Wilson’s biography Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (Bloomsbury 432pp £25) stops at a pivotal year, 1957, when Spark’s first novel was published. The