The Story Archive

The Girls of Slender Means

Muriel Spark · 1963 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

In the summer between the two victory days of 1945, the residents of a Kensington hostel for young women of slender means share out ration coupons, a poetry-reciting elocution teacher and one Schiaparelli evening dress. A visiting anarchist writer courts one of them and reads the house as a model of a society; the slimmest girls can get through the lavatory window to the roof and the others cannot. Spark's tightest book, its rhythm set by Hopkins's shipwreck ode, which one of the girls has by heart.

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