Spark captures the essence of shared living - of small concerns over weight, what one might wear on an important date, how to negotiate rationing to continue with daily beauty routines, and the like – and demonstrates the essential skill of a novelist of foregrounding the mundane while cranking up the stakes in the background. But while the narrative circles around the small issues of daily life, one cannot help but feel disaster looming for the girls given the backdrop of (albeit fading) war and the rather slender opportunities for young ladies. The narrative circles around the small quarrels that are unavoidable when so many people are thrown together, the stories the girls tell one another and the small cruelties that are inevitable, but also the collegiate spirit, the Schiaparelli dress that is shared between them for special occasions, the bartering of small rationed luxuries for necessities and vice versa.
We have Jane, who works in publishing and eats heavily to fuel her “brain work”, Joanna with her religious assuredness, Selina who collects men, and many more besides. Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) is a patchwork tale of the girls who live at The May of Teck Club as their independent stories stitch together to form a shared narrative of the Young Single Lady. For the girls at The May of Teck Club (an establishment "for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years" in Kensington, London), the end of war will effect no significance change: they will go on, each seeking their own personal goals, be they a job in publishing, an inch off one’s waist, or – most popular a goal – a nice young man who could be considered marriage material. Britain’s young people are having to refocus their aims for a world no longer at war. It is 1945 and the end of war is in sight. Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.
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