This is beautifully packaged reissue of one of Muriel Spark`s best loved novels, ” The Girls of Slender Means”. ` Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions`. In the May of Teck Club
- a London hostel `three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit`
- the young lady residents do their best to act as if the war never happened. They practice elocution, & jostle one another over suitors & a single Schiaparelli gown. But behind the girls` giddy literary & amorous peregrinations they hide some tragically painful secrets & wounds. ` You girls are my vocation...I am dedicated to you in my prime`. ” Reading the novel as a young woman was a random gift; rereading it today is to encounter the rarest of fiction & to appreciate the early & enduring genius of Muriel Spark”. (Carol Shields, ” Guardian”). ” One of Spark`s most evocative novels”. (Anne Taylor). Muriel Spark was born & educated in Edinburgh. She was active in the field of creative writing since 1950, when she won a short-story writing competition in the ” Observer”, & her many subsequent novels include ” Memento Mori” (1959), ” The Ballad of Peckham Rye” (1960), ” The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961), ” The Girls of Slender Means” (1963) & ” Aiding & Abetting” (2000). She also wrote plays, poems, children`s books & biographies. She became Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993, & died in 2006.