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By Muriel Spark

"Long in the past in 1945 all of the great humans in England have been negative, bearing in mind exceptions," starts The ladies of narrow Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London girls' hostel simply rising from the shadow of worldwide warfare II.

just like the might of Teck membership itself―"three occasions window shattered considering that 1940 yet by no means without delay hit"―its woman population do their most sensible to behave as though the area have been again to general: practising elocution, and jostling over suitors and a unmarried Schiaparelli dress. The novel's harrowing finishing unearths that the women' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding a few tragically painful conflict wounds.

selected through Anthony Burgess as the most effective sleek Novels within the Sunday Times of London, The women of slim Means is a taut and eerily excellent novel by way of an writer The long island Times has known as "one of this century's best creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

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Extra info for The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic)

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The sensation of poetry replaced the sensation of the curate, and she took on pupils at six shillings an hour pending her diploma. __ Nobody at the May of Teck Club knew her precise history, but it was generally assumed to be something emotionally heroic. She was compared to Ingrid Bergman, and did not take part in the argument between members and staff about the food, whether it contained too many fattening properties, even allowing for the necessities of wartime rationing. 3 Love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories.

For a typewritten letter signed by the author, Rudi paid two shillings if the autograph was scarce, but if the author's signature was available everywhere, and the letter a mere formal acknowledgment, Rudi paid nothing. For a letter in the author's own handwriting Rudi paid five shillings for the first page and a shilling thereafter. Jane's ingenuity was therefore awakened to the feat of composing the sort of letters which would best move the recipient to reply in total holograph. Rudi paid for the writing paper and the postage.

There was something about Selina's lolling which gave her a queenly eminence. She visibly appraised Nicholas, while he continued to glance here and there at the several groups of chattering girls in other parts of the room. The terrace doors stood wide open to the cool night and presently from the recreation room there came, by way of the terrace, the sound of Joanna in the process of an elocution lesson. __ "I wish she would stick to _The Wreck of the Deutschland__," Judy Redwood said. " Joanna's pupil recited: _I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,__ The excitement over the slit window went on for the rest of the afternoon.

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