Over the past couple of months, I have read three fine books about three of my favourite novelists, all of them women, as it happens. Those in search of holiday reading would, I think, derive great enjoyment from the new biographies of Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor and Jean Rhys – and, indeed, from any of the many excellent novels written by them.

Each of the trio has a fiercely loyal fan base, whose memberships often overlap, as I know from dealings with fellow admirers over many years. In the case of Spark and Taylor aficionados, we appreciate the precision of language and the wit each brings to her work. Fans of Taylor and Rhys can both take pride in being part of a small-ish coterie: throughout her writing life, Taylor was so little known as always to be confused with the actress of the same name, while Rhys disappeared for decades into an alcoholic abyss.

It is from these fan bases, quite clearly, that the writers of all three biographies were drawn. In the case of Martin Stannard, the author of Muriel Spark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), it was Dame Muriel herself who did the drawing. She had read with admiration Stannard’s two-volume biography of her fellow Catholic convert (and early champion) Evelyn Waugh and in 1992 invited him to write her life, offering interviews and full access to her meticulously kept papers. That she was not best pleased with the less than wholly flattering portrait that was starting to emerge before her death in 2006, only indicates the determination and professionalism he brought to the task.

In both these qualities he was more than matched by his subject. She surely outdid him in ruthlessness, both where her writing was concerned and in the relentless social mountaineering made possible by the huge sums it earned her. Friends and family members were dropped without hesitation when they became boring, demanding of her time or no longer useful. “She went through people like pieces of Kleenex,” said her New Yorker colleague Ved Mehta.

Stannard particularly excels (as might be expected from a professor of English literature) in discussing Spark’s extensive body of work. I was interested to learn that Dame Muriel considered The Driver’s Seat – a disturbing novel in which a woman plans her own rape and murder – “her best written and best-constructed”. There is continued fascination in discovering how extensively events in her own life are paralleled in her fiction, in books dealing with her Edinburgh upbringing – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, of course – and those making use of her later life in London, New York and Italy.

Sound description and criticism of her subject’s novels are the best feature of Nicola Beauman’s The Other Elizabeth Taylor (Persephone Books, £15).The title refers not just to the confusion with the actress alluded to above but also to the double nature of Taylor’s own life. While a picture of respectability in the Buckinghamshire village of Penn – as the wife of a prosperous, well-connected businessman who found time amid her household chores to write well-received books – she had led another existence as a communist and adulterer.

There was one curious omission in the book, which I would love to have seen rectified. We are told much in the biography of her daily visits to the local pub but nothing of what she actually did there, specifically what she drank and how much she drank.

Such a rehearsal might have become tiresome in the case of Jean Rhys, the answer to the questions being anything she could lay her hands on and in whatever quantity was available. Rather read Lilian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour (Bloomsbury £18.99) for its account of a sad but in the end productive literary life.