Novelist Evelyn Waugh, most famous for Brideshead Revisited (1945), heard voices persecuting him during a sea-voyage to Ceylon in 1954. Upon his return he was diagnosed with bromide poisoning from insomnia medication, though he had also been suffering from anxieties over money, ill-health, and unfavourable responses to his new-found celebrity. As a result of these experiences, he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), later stating that ‘Mr Pinfold’s experiences were almost exactly my own’. Over the course of the novel, Pinfold starts to believe that he is the victim of a scientific experiment in telepathy, conducted by members of the BBC.

By strange coincidence, the novelist Muriel Spark also began to have unusual experiences in 1954, shortly after her conversion to Roman Catholicism. For a short while she became convinced that the poet T. S. Eliot was sending her threatening messages. Over the course of her recovery, she began to write her first novel, The Comforters (1957), in which the protagonist Caroline Rose hears a typewriter and a chorus of voices narrating her into existence.

Much like Spark herself, Caroline ends up deciding to write her own novel about ‘Characters in a novel’, partly as an act of resistance against the voices which try to control her. In this way, Spark used her experience as a creative prompt to explore the nature of plots and narrative, and the relationship between authors and their characters, while at the same time using fictional narrative as a way of addressing her experience.

Spark’s publishers were unwilling to publish her novel, finding it too odd – until, that is, Waugh saw the draft and recognised his own experience in hers. Waugh’s praise convinced Macmillan to publish Spark’s novel, launching her career as a novelist.