Dave's Book Blog: "The Girls of Slender Means" by Muriel Spark

Thursday, 23 July 2026

"The Girls of Slender Means" by Muriel Spark

Set in a charity-run boarding-house, the May of Teck Club, in London towards the end and immediately after the second world war, this delightful novel starts with keen observation of some of the girls who live in the house, and a couple of their boy-friends, and ends with a bang.

The early part is driven by piquing the reader's curiosity. Nicholas Farringdon has become a missionary and been killed in Haiti. Jane, who lived in the house and worked for a publisher to whom Nicholas submitted a book, now a journalist, wants to find out what motivated a man who slept around to become a celibate Brother.

The story is told in the third person omniscient and the past tense. It hops between the time just after the death of Nicholas and the days when the GOSM lived in the boarding-house.

There are a couple of extended metaphors.

Joanna's eloquent recital of poetry is compared to a cat playing with e mouse: “Poetry which she loved rather as it might be assumed a cat loves birds; poetry, especially the declamatory sort, excited and possessed her; she would pounce on the stuff, play with it quivering in her mind, and when she had got it by heart, she spoke it forth with devouring relish.” (Ch 1)
There's a lot of covert sex in this description of Nicholas sleeping with Selina. “It was not the first instance of a man taking a girl to bed with the aim of converting her soul, but he, in great exasperation, felt that it was, and poignantly, in bed, willed and willed the awakening of her social conscience. after which, he sighed softly into his pillow with a limp sense of achievement, and presently rose to find, with more exasperation than ever, that he had not in the least conveyed his vision of perfection to the girl.” (Ch 7). Poignant derives from a Latin work meaning 'prick'. The 'willed and willed' suggests the repeated insertion of the willy, a slang term for penis. The 'limp' and 'presently rose' suggest the penis in its flaccid and erect states. Spark is suggesting that the idealised love felt by Nicholas for Selina is rooted in carnality.

It is written with Spark's trademark elegance. She takes time to explore the mostly eccentric characters involved before heading for the culminating scene. It is perfectly plotted, with lots of subtle foreshadowing. Short and easy to read, I found this delightful little novel very enjoyable.

Selected quotes:

“Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity.” (Ch 1)
“Everyone carried shopping bag in case they should be lucky enough to pass a shop that had a sudden stock of something off the rations.” (Ch 1)
“Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.” (Ch 1)
“Dorothy could emit, at any hour of the day or night, a waterfall of debutante chatter, which rightly gave the impression that on any occasion between talking, eating and sleeping, she did not think, except in terms of these phrase-ripples of hers.” (Ch 3)
“The beautiful heedless poverty of a Golden Age did not come into the shilling meter life which any sane girl would regard only as a temporary one until better opportunities occurred.” (Ch 4)
“It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.” (Ch 5)
“Elsewhere on the globe people slept, queued for liberation-rations, beat the tom-toms, took shelter from the bombers, or went for a ride on a dodgem at the fun-fair.” (Ch 8)

Synopsis: spoiler alert

After a little explication of the May of Teck Club, the boarding-house in which the GOSM live, Jane phones Dorothy to tell her that Nicholas has been martyred in Haiti. We then jump back in time to be introduced to the characters, including:

Joanna, who gives elocution lessons through recitations of poetry, including the Psalms,
Greggie, one of the older members, who keeps the garden maintained and is convinced there is an unexploded bomb in it (a version of Chekhov's gun, you know this bomb will ast some point explode),
Selina who wants to access the roof so she can sleep on it with boyfriends but is baulked by the fact that the skylight has been bricked up so she finds she can wriggle through a seven inch wide window because she is a slender girl, as well as having slender means (word-play in the title!)
Anne who can manage the window if naked and smeared with soap and owns a Schiaparelli evening dress which they all borrow
Jane who woks for a publisher, finding the flaws in authors' manuscripts so that the publisher can persuade the author to negotiate their contracts; she also writes fan letters to authors in the hope they will reply because their handwriting (even just their signatures) can be sold to collectors
George the publisher and his wife Tilly,
Nicholas, who wants to sleep with Selina, on the Club roof,
Felix, an American, married to Gareth in America, who is sleeping with Selina but passes her on to Nicholas when Gareth decides to come to England to visit.

Jane agrees to forge a letter for Nicholas praising his book so that George, her employer, will be persuaded to negotiate better terms with Nicholas. Feeling guilty, Jane invites Tilly to lunch at the club on a day when Felix's wife Gareth is to give a talk about Ethical Guardianship. Tilly is persuaded to try to get through the window to go onto the roof but, despite stripping naked, gets stuck. Nicholas is called to climb onto the roof via the American military offices next door, to push Tilly back through the window but as he is on the roof, the unexploded bomb explodes (told you!). Tilly is popped back through the window. A gas main catches fire and the house begins to burn. The girls on the upper floors are trapped, except for the couple that can squeeze through the window. Skinny Selina actually pops back to collect the Schiaparelli dress. The fire brigade arrives and starts to unblock the skylight. Most of the girls escape before the building collapses but Joanna, reciting Psalms, is crushed in the masonry.

July 2026; 142 pages

First published by Macmillan in 1963

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin in 2020