The Girls of Slender Means

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to a Jewish father and Anglican mother. Spark studied at Heriot-Watt College and worked as a secretary for a time before becoming engaged to Sidney Oswald Spark in 1937 and moving with him to Southern Rhodesia (contemporary Zimbabwe). The couple married in September 1937, and Spark gave birth to their son the following year. The marriage soon deteriorated due to Sidney’s mental health issues and violent episodes. Spark left her husband in 1940 and returned to Britain in 1944, where she worked in intelligence for the remainder of World War II. She sent money to support her son (children were not allowed to travel during the war), who later returned to Scotland and was raised by his maternal grandparents. Spark began her writing career in earnest after World War II, writing poetry and literary criticism. She served as editor of the Poetry Review for a time, starting in 1947. She converted to Catholicism in 1954, around which time she published her first novels. Spark’s debut novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957 and was met with praise from critics. She is perhaps best known for her 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was first published in the New Yorker. Spark lived in a bedsit in London between 1955 and 1965. She lived in New York City for a time and later moved to Italy, settling in Tuscany, where she lived for the rest of her life. Spark earned many literary awards throughout her career. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 1998 she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English Pen. She became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993. She died in Tuscany in 2006.

The main story of The Girls of Slender Means takes place in 1945, toward the end of World War II, which began on September 1, 1939, and officially ended on September 2, 1945. The global conflict involved nearly all the world’s countries, but London—then the largest city in the world—suffered extensive aerial attacks from Nazi Germany. Somewhere between 18,000 and 19,000 civilians were killed in London during the war, and many more lost their homes. The Blitz, a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, took place between September 1940 to May 1941. German forces carried out mass air attacks, beginning in London on September 7, 1940 and continuing nightly until November 2. The last major raid occurred in May 1941 and resulted in 1,436 civilian deaths. In total, 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped on London over the course of the Blitz. London suffered another series of brutal bombings in 1944 and 1945, with the V-1 and V-2 attacks (named for the types of bomb used). The V-1 and V-2 rockets required no crew and were launched from occupied states in continental Europe. It’s estimated that over 900 V-1s and 164 V-2s hit London during the war. Spark’s novel references two key events of World War II: V-J Day and V-E Day. Victory over Japan Day, or V-J Day (stylized V.J. Day in the novel) commemorates Imperial Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, effectively ending the war. Victory in Europe Day, also known as V-E Day, celebrates the Allies’ victory over Germany, which occurred on May 8, 1945.

Muriel Spark authored 22 novels over the course of her career. Perhaps her best known is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Like The Girls of Slender Means, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features a cast of mainly female characters and is set against the backdrop of war. The story takes place in Edinburgh in the 1930s and features a group of girls who study under a charismatic teacher named Miss Jean Brodie, who has somewhat unorthodox teaching methods. The novel follows the girls as they come of age, and it features themes of power and control, religion, and growing up. Also like The Girls of Slender Means, the narrative structure of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features abundant flashforwards and flashbacks. Spark’s 1968 novel The Public Image was shortlisted for the Book Prize. It is set in Rome and follows a rising young actress she tries to achieve success despite her lack of talent. In its use of experimental narrative techniques, The Girls of Slender Means may be compared to the novels of the famed modernist author Virginia Woolf. Though the titular female protagonist of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is an upper-class woman, the novel’s use of flashbacks and shifting narrative perspectives resemble Spark’s narrative structure in The Girls of Slender Means. It is also set in London in the wake of war (in Mrs. Dalloway, that war is World War I) and examines the psychological impact of war’s violence on individual characters and on the spirit of London as a whole. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land also shares some commonalities with Spark’s novel in that it lacks a single narrative or tone of voice, features abrupt shifts, and grapples (albeit indirectly) with the trauma of war and violence.