Muriel Spark: The Biography, by Martin Stannard; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, $66.95.

For those who believe a great author should be remembered more for her work than her life, any biography will fall short, since it isn’t literary criticism. Biography serves a different purpose and has different readers. While some readers do want a biography to shed more light on her work, some are obsessed with a psychological dissection of her life, some crave gossip and other forms of debunking, and some are simply celebrity voyeurs. Given such tabloid tendencies—of looking for the bad and wanting to know whether the great author was an ungrateful daughter, a difficult sister, a poor wife, an uncaring mother, a petulant celebrity, an intellectual snob, a disloyal friend, and finally, when all the men in her life failed her, whether she became a lesbian—it must be hard for the serious biographer to strike the right balance between two extremes: being a Frank Kermode at one end; being a Kitty Kelley at the other. Martin Stannard is in a unique position to achieve a perfect balance, since he’s a professor of modern literature, but there’s a story behind this long-awaited biography of Muriel Spark, one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and original authors.

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, by John Carey; Faber & Faber, 2009, $49.99.

John Carey’s William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies discusses the novelist and his work. The subtitle, Carey admits, is ironic. Golding was much more than the author of his first published (and most celebrated) novel. As a biographer, Carey has been blessed. He has secured access to and presented to the public such a mass of material that his biography will be a valuable resource for any future attempts to discuss Golding’s life and works.

First, Golding’s father, a bookish, atheist and socialist school teacher, kept a journal, which Carey uses to provide insights into the man who had the most significant influence on Golding the writer.

The Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, HarperCollins, 2009, $18.95.

Lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, may return to that realm with The Children of Hurin, published posthumously and with some fairly light-handed editing and explanation by his son.

Some who have dipped into The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s uncompleted and posthumously-published account of the Elder Days, have been put off by its high, epic style, without the alleviating homeliness to be found in The Lord of the Rings, or the frequent humour of The Hobbit, as well as by the fact that it is a set of long fragments, not quite seamlessly joined. In the complex, interwoven tales it is also sometimes difficult to tell who is who.