Book Review ‘The Girls of Slender Means’: Muriel Sparks on Personal Morality after Social Crisis

Editor’s note: Madeleine Kearns writes a weekly column noting peculiar aspects of cultural, artistic, and natural marvels.

‘Write about what you know” is advice sometimes given to writers. Muriel Spark, who knew about being a young woman, and about post-war Britain, heeded that instruction at age 45 when she wrote The Girls of Slender Means. Her short novel tells the story of some young women living in an Edwardian manor turned residency for under 30s, “the May of Teck Club,” in old Kensington, just after the Second World War. “Few people alive at the time,” Spark writes, “were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means.”

About the Author

Madeleine Kearns

Madeleine Kearns is a former staff writer at National Review.

Editor’s note: Madeleine Kearns writes a weekly column noting peculiar aspects of cultural, artistic, and natural marvels.

‘Write about what you know” is advice sometimes given to writers. Muriel Spark, who knew about being a young woman, and about post-war Britain, heeded that instruction at age 45 when she wrote The Girls of Slender Means. Her short novel tells the story of some young women living in an Edwardian manor turned residency for under 30s, “the May of Teck Club,” in old Kensington, just after the Second World War. “Few people alive at the time,” Spark writes, “were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means.”