The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

But it is in the past that the action of the story and its violent culmination take place.

There are two kinds of time in 'The Girls of Slender Means.' There is the past of that far-off spring of wartime regulations and shortages when the girls in the May of Teck Club bartered soap and chocolate and shared one SchiaparelliĮvening dress among them, and there is the present when these girls have long since scattered to their various fates. Although the girls sometimes damned it as a 'hostel' in their darker moods, they really rather liked itĪnd enjoyed showing their guests both the house and the garden behind where a wartime bomb had burst, and where another-according to an aging spinster who had been in the house at the time-lay unexploded.

Now decayed and shaky, its tall shabby rooms and its long windows with their newly replaced panes had a certain grandeur. This building-converted long ago from a private establishment to a home for 'Ladies of Slender Means' below the age of 30 who had to live away from their families in order to 'follow an Occupation'-was still serving its purpose. In the spring of 1945, right after the European victory, in a four-story Edwardian mansion known as the May of Teck Club. It is, as the title indicates, a story about a group of girls-no less concerned with love and money than those in Mary McCarthy's 'group' and no less satirically presented, but with how different a slant! These girls were living in London Her very skirting of the sensibilities is a sign of a how fully aware of them she is, as she proved especially in her unerring picture of the old in 'Memento Mori' and as she now provesĪgain in this story about the young, 'The Girls of Slender Means.' These might add up to dryness,īut in Miss Spark's work, they do not. Muriel Spark,Īn aloof, sharp-eyed Scotswoman, is such a writer, and her most noticeable characteristics are, of course, her wit, her absolute pitch in dialogue, her economy of style and her sedulous avoidance of sentiment.

N a day when so many writers seem to write so much alike, it is a delight to discover one who writes like no one except herself. The Girls of Slender Means By Muriel Spark SeptemFew Were More Delightful, Lovely or Savage By VIRGILIA PETERSON.

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark