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Review
Spark writes with a light comic touch, but there's an undertone of a kind of existential desperation.--Patrick T. Reardon
Product Description
This is London 1945, when all nice people are poor. Muriel Spark sets us down among the girls of good family but slender means as they fight it out, from their Kensington hostel to the last clothing coupon until this charmingly light-hearted period in their lives descends into horror and tragedy.
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Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The story looks back to the war, when a random group of girls with very little money who are working as clerks and secretaries for the war effort, live in a hotel for genteel young gentlewomen just off Kensington High Street. The novel tells of their escapades, their relationships to one another, their generous sharing of a single Shiaparelli evening gown, their climbing out of a tiny attic window onto the roof for frolics - well, those who are thin enough can.
All of this becomes linked towards the end of the story, when there is the most wonderful description of a typical London wartime event, with all its pitfalls and ramifications. (won't say what, don't want to spoil the story, but being 'slender' becomes very important.)
It's all told with her sharp, sharp wit, her eye for observation and her cutting comments about people and the way they are, yet her sense of amusement at it all never makes it seem harsh. Elegant, funny, so short you wish it were longer, this is Muriel Spark at her best and a great follow-up to Miss Jean Brodie if you are coming to it from there.
All of this becomes linked towards the end of the story, when there is the most wonderful description of a typical London wartime event, with all its pitfalls and ramifications. (won't say what, don't want to spoil the story, but being 'slender' becomes very important.)
It's all told with her sharp, sharp wit, her eye for observation and her cutting comments about people and the way they are, yet her sense of amusement at it all never makes it seem harsh. Elegant, funny, so short you wish it were longer, this is Muriel Spark at her best and a great follow-up to Miss Jean Brodie if you are coming to it from there.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Girls of Slender Means tells the stories of several young women in the year of 1945 living in The May of Teck Club (pretty much a hostel) near Kensington Gardens. The girls are all working as clerks or secretaries and living on rations, clothing coupons and hand outs from admiring men. Through each on of the girls in the book Spark looks at the morals and plotting of such a group of women in both a comic and sometimes shocking way.
We have Joanna a rectors daughter who shockingly fell for a rector herself before coming to London and teaching elocution lessons, Greggie, Jarvie and Collie the old maids of the building, Pauline Fox a mad young lady who believes she dines with the actor Jack Buchanan every night, Jane Wright who works in a publisher and gets authors to write letters signed she can sell on the black market and yet who doesn't know Henry James is dead and Selina a woman of loose morals who sleeps with weak men but pursues strong ones for marriage partners she wont sleep with yet. All of them will become more unified and torn apart though not only when Nicholas Farringdon a charming author turns up, but when a shocking (I gasped) event leads to one girls fatal end (I gasped again). A small book that packs a big punch or two.
We have Joanna a rectors daughter who shockingly fell for a rector herself before coming to London and teaching elocution lessons, Greggie, Jarvie and Collie the old maids of the building, Pauline Fox a mad young lady who believes she dines with the actor Jack Buchanan every night, Jane Wright who works in a publisher and gets authors to write letters signed she can sell on the black market and yet who doesn't know Henry James is dead and Selina a woman of loose morals who sleeps with weak men but pursues strong ones for marriage partners she wont sleep with yet. All of them will become more unified and torn apart though not only when Nicholas Farringdon a charming author turns up, but when a shocking (I gasped) event leads to one girls fatal end (I gasped again). A small book that packs a big punch or two.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This slim volume has it all - great and thoughtful writing, superb characterisation, a good story, wonderful atmosphere, humour, tragedy and pace. Spark has fitted everything into her 142 pages that Dickens might take four or five times that to cover.
Set in London towards the end of World War 2, the Girls of the title are well bred ladies living in the oddly named May of Teck, which is a boarding house for genteel, hard up, single girls although a few middle aged spinsters also still live there. The girls' main occupation is men and they fall in and out of love as various young boys pass through their lives and back into the war. One such is Nicholas Farringdon, a would-be poet, who we know at the start of the story is going to die.
The plot revolves around Farringdon's interaction with three of the girls, Jane Wright who works for the publishing house that Nicholas hopes will take up his poems, Selina Redwood who is the most beautiful and manipulative of the girls, and Joanna Childe the daughter of a church minister who teaches elocution through poetry and psalms to the other girls.
A surprise love story evolves as Farringdon spends the summer sleeping with Selina on the roof of the May Teck club where they are safe from prying eyes - because only the very slimmest girls can wriggle through the window onto the roof (hence the double meaning of the title). There is a mad swirl around them as the war ends and people try to find stability in their lives. The spinsters worry that there is a UXB in the garden, the girls swap their Schiaparelli taffeta evening dress backwards and forwards to social events, there are parties and boys and Joanna's poetry as well as side plots about Jane's boss, Selina's other boyfriend and so on. It's a delightful comedic mix but as tragedy erupts the girls' lives are changed forever and the world of the May Teck Club comes to an end - reflecting back the demise and changes that the war has made on Britain and the Edwardian way of life.
This is written with great finesse and empathy for the girls and their situation. It's a shame it is so short but that is a characteristic of all Muriel Spark's books -and I shall now be seeking them out.
Set in London towards the end of World War 2, the Girls of the title are well bred ladies living in the oddly named May of Teck, which is a boarding house for genteel, hard up, single girls although a few middle aged spinsters also still live there. The girls' main occupation is men and they fall in and out of love as various young boys pass through their lives and back into the war. One such is Nicholas Farringdon, a would-be poet, who we know at the start of the story is going to die.
The plot revolves around Farringdon's interaction with three of the girls, Jane Wright who works for the publishing house that Nicholas hopes will take up his poems, Selina Redwood who is the most beautiful and manipulative of the girls, and Joanna Childe the daughter of a church minister who teaches elocution through poetry and psalms to the other girls.
A surprise love story evolves as Farringdon spends the summer sleeping with Selina on the roof of the May Teck club where they are safe from prying eyes - because only the very slimmest girls can wriggle through the window onto the roof (hence the double meaning of the title). There is a mad swirl around them as the war ends and people try to find stability in their lives. The spinsters worry that there is a UXB in the garden, the girls swap their Schiaparelli taffeta evening dress backwards and forwards to social events, there are parties and boys and Joanna's poetry as well as side plots about Jane's boss, Selina's other boyfriend and so on. It's a delightful comedic mix but as tragedy erupts the girls' lives are changed forever and the world of the May Teck Club comes to an end - reflecting back the demise and changes that the war has made on Britain and the Edwardian way of life.
This is written with great finesse and empathy for the girls and their situation. It's a shame it is so short but that is a characteristic of all Muriel Spark's books -and I shall now be seeking them out.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Youth's a stuff will not endure
Saw a sublime dramatisation of this in Edinburgh two or three years back. In the original inky 'flesh' it's a slight, bitter-sweet threnody, a novella almost, about the... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Simon G. Barrett
very dated wartime
Very disappointing, flat, mundane, no real storyline, and nothing new or exciting. A group of women and how they live at the end of the war in a hostel together culminating in an... Read more
Published 10 months ago by scottish reader
The Girls Of Slender Means
It would be foolish to judge an author by one book, especially one who was as prolific as Muriel Spark. Read more
Published 13 months ago by N. A. Spencer
Enjoyable and insightful, though not Spark's best novel
Erudite, intelligent and a little sardonic, Muriel Spark's entertaining novel 'The Girls of Slender Means' centers around a women's boarding house at the close of World War Two. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Mr. D Burin
Disappointed
I bought this from a recommendation but was disappointed. I'd expected something charmingly 40s-style, girl chatter etc. - from the description. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Multikulti
book
thanks. sorry about problem with my card payment. book arrived fast and good condition
Published on 21 Mar 2009 by Rosalind J. Southern
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