Muriel Spark : The Girls of Slender Means : 1st Edition 1963 : Dust Jacket

The Girls of Slender Means

By Muriel Spark

Published by Macmillan, London, 1963. First Edition. Hardback book in original dust jacket. 8vo. 183 pages (last page not numbered).

CONDITION
A good first edition. The dust jacket remains unclipped and in good condition with some light rubbing to the spine ends. Boards and spine are very good. All contents present and pages clean throughout. No names or writing to the book. Overall a very good first edition.

The Girls of Slender Means is a novella written in 1963 by British author Muriel Spark. It was included in Anthony Burgess's 1984 book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice. In 2022, it was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

The book centres on 'The May of Teck Club', a fictional institution said to have been established by Princess May of Teck during the First World War[ "for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London". It concerns the lives and loves of its disparate residents amongst the deprivations of immediate post-war Kensington between VE Day and VJ Day in 1945. The story is framed by the news, in 1963, that Nicholas Farringdon, an anarchist intellectual turned Jesuit, has been killed in Haiti. Journalist Jane Wright, a former inhabitant of the Club, wants to research his story. The bulk of the novella is taken up by flashbacks to 1945, concerning Farringdon and the Club, to which he had been a frequent visitor before his conversion. The narrative climaxes with a tragedy.

(Platform, Scottish Literature)