Muriel Spark, left, and Rosemary Tonks, right. Following her conversion, she wrote twenty-two celebrated novels, marked for their outlandish comedy and, as Judith Shulevitz said, “screwball storylines that recapitulate our hapless drift toward final judgment.” I regularly stalk the website of New Directions, looking for possible additions to my TBR (plenty of Muriel Spark there, incidentally). The timeline’s fuzzy, but around 1980 she converted to a strident stripe of Pentecostalism, a galaxy away from Spark’s worldly Catholicism. Spark entered the Catholic Church and penned twenty-two novels; Tonks emerged from the Jordan determined to destroy the six she’d already written.