The Girls of Slender Means

By Muriel Spark

London, 1945. The girls of slender means are the residents of the May of Teck Club, a genteel yet rather shabby boarding house established for the ‘social protection of ladies of slender means below the age of thirty years’. The novel concerns their everyday affairs over a period of a few weeks before a shocking event transforms their lives.

This is one of the 22 novels written by Muriel Spark in her lifetime. All are being published by Polygon in hardback Centenary Editions between November 2017 and September 2018.

The introduction is by Rosemary Goring, who was literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, The Herald and the Sunday Herald. In 2007 she published Scotland: The Autobiography, which has since been published in America and Russia. She is also the author of two novels, After Flodden and Dacre’s War.