The Girls of Slender Means Summary

In the novel’s present, newspaper columnist Jane Wright is on the phone with Dorothy Markham to tell Dorothy about the death of Nicholas Farringdon, a Jesuit priest and former anarchist who has recently been martyred in Haiti, and about whom Jane is writing an article. The women knew Nicholas back when they were living at the Mey of Teck Club (essentially a hostel for young, unmarried working women) in Kensington, London, in 1945. The building that housed the May of Teck Club was destroyed in the summer of 1945 after an unexploded bomb dropped during World War II went off in the club’s garden. Jane, Dorothy, and some other girls survived, but several girls died in the ensuing fire.

As Jane, in the present, calls up old acquaintances to inform them of Nicholas’s death and conduct research for her article, the narrative flashes backward and forward in time between the novel’s present day and the period in 1945 when Jane knew Nicholas and lived at the May of Teck Club. The narration consists of brief, loosely connected scenes through which readers get a sense of the different girls who lived at the club and the ups and downs of their life there. When readers first encounter the club and its female residents, the girls are grumbling (and playfully scoffing) over a notice that Lady Julia Markham, chairwoman of the club’s management committee, has posted to admonish the girls for complaining about the ugly new wallpaper in the club’s drawing room.

One of the girls who lives at the club in 1945 is named Joanna Childe, the devout, smart, and reserved daughter of a clergyman. Joanna swore off romance long ago and has since dedicated herself to honing her elocution skills, taking on a roster of her own pupils and teaching lessons at the May of Teck Club. Joanna has a singular taste in poetry, preferring religious texts and Shakespeare to modern poets like Auden. She frequently recites the Hopkins poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. The May of Teck girls are used to hearing Joana’s crisp and precise voice as she gives lessons, represented in the novel through stanzas of the poetry that punctuate the narrative.

Last week, the May of Teck girls went to London’s Buckingham Palace to celebrate London’s victory over Germany. The mood is celebratory but apprehensive as the girls and other Londoners wonder how their lives will fit into the new “world order” that will emerge in the wake of the war’s end.

On a different day in 1945, Nicholas Farringdon and another man are in a café conversing with the May of Teck girls they’re dating, one of whom is Jane. Jane—a brainy girl interested in intellectual matters—tries to discuss poetry with the men, but they largely ignore her.

Later, the narration gives an overview of the different floors of the May of Teck Club and the women who live on them. An upper floor contains the dormitories, which house girls who grew up in boarding schools in the English countryside. They gossip about men and romance, though they don’t have much experience with either. The third floor houses the “old maids,” older unmarried women who, for reasons unknown to any of the girls, have been allowed to remain at the club despite its cutoff age of 30. One of these women, Greggie, has lived at the club a long time and takes great pride in tending its garden. She was at the club when two bombs dropped near it, only one of which went off. Greggie suspects the second unexploded bomb is still somewhere in the garden, likely near the hydrangeas. The fourth floor houses the most worldly and beautiful May of Peck girls. These girls have lovers and “men-friends,” romantic partners they consider as marriageable options and therefore hold off on having sex with. Above this floor is the roof. Though the roof was once accessible via a trap-door in the bathroom ceiling, it was boarded up after a lover or burglar snuck through it, entered the house, and attacked one of the girls. This is unfortunate for the dormitory girls, who long to use the flat roof for sunbathing. Selina, a strikingly beautiful dormitory girl, has since discovered that the roof can also be accessed by a window in the lavatory, but it’s so narrow that only the slenderest girls can fit through it. Selina is one of these girls. Other girls can manage it but require assistance: a girl named Anne, for instance, must remove the added bulk of her clothes.

Jane lives on the top floor. She’s overweight and can’t fit through the lavatory window. In any case, she’s more interested in her “brain-work”—work she does for her boss George at his somewhat dodgy publishing firm, Huy Throvis-Mew; and the (also dodgy) letter-writing she does for a Romanian man named Rudi on the side. Rudi has Jane write sentimental fan mail to famous writers in an effort to elicit their (signed) responses, which he then sells on the black market. It’s through her work at the publishing firm that Jane becomes acquainted with Nicholas, her latest focus. George has tasked her with digging up dirt on Nicholas and uncovering his insecurities so that George can use it against him and coerce him into signing a contract that disproportionately benefits the firm, not the author.

Jane reaches out to Rudi for information on Nicholas. Rudi admits that he does know Nicholas, and he warns against publishing Nicholas’s manuscript, The Sabbath Notebooks. According to Rudi, Nicholas is an aimless young man who doesn’t know what he wants and holds no real ideals. None of what Rudi says makes Jane dislike Nicholas, though, and she quietly decides to sabotage George’s plans to exploit Nicholas.

Jane invites Nicholas to the May of Teck Club one day, and he is immediately fascinated and enchanted by the place and the girls who live there, romanticizing their relative poverty and their zeal for life. He is struck by Selina’s beauty and begins a romance with her, and the two eventually begin sneaking onto the roof, where they have sex. Selina is also seeing Nicholas’s colleague at the Intelligence Agency where he works, Colonel G. Felix Dobell, though she considers him a weak man and is only using him for sex and ration cards. Selina has no more respect for Nicholas, considering his views radical to the point of crazy. Thus, she uses him, like Felix, for sex and rations cards.

Throughout the first weeks of July, Nicholas continues to visit the May of Teck Club and ingratiate himself with the girls. Jane keeps him up to date on the club’s goings on, but he always wants to know more. Eventually, Jane, out of fondness for Nicholas, tells him about George’s plan to exploit him. They concoct a new plan for Jane to write a phony letter praising Nicholas’s writing and intellect, written from the perspective of Charles Morgan. Jane agrees but feels guilty for sabotaging George, who a fine boss, all things considered. Seemingly out of guilt, Jane decides to invite George’s wife Tilly over to the club to attend a lecture Colonel Felix Dobell’s wife Gareth is giving on behalf of the Guild of Ethical Guardians on July 27.

On Friday, July 27, Tilly comes over to the club. Unbeknownst to Jane, Anne and Selina escort Tilly to the top floor to show her the narrow window in the lavatory. Jane only finds out about this after she hears screaming coming from the bathroom—Tilly tried to slip through the window but got stuck. When Jane enters the bathroom to see what’s going on, she’s horrified to find Tilly naked and covered in margarine, which the girls applied to her bare flesh in an effort to get her unstuck. Jane pleads with Tilly to calm down, then she leaves to get help. Jane calls Nicholas, who agrees to come at once.

Nicholas arrives in a taxi and enters the hotel next door, where Intelligence has set up temporary offices. (Nicholas’s office is in the attic, from which he can access the hotel’s roof, which is directly next to the club’s.) Jane watches as Nicholas makes his way to Tilly—then suddenly, as the clock strikes half past six, there’s an explosion, and he falls to the ground. The second bomb in the garden went off—Greggie was right all along.

The club breaks out in chaos. A gas main breaks, and then the club is engulfed in flames. Most of the May of Teck Club girls manage to escape and gather on the street outside as ambulances arrive. Of the girls who remain inside, only Anne, Pauline, and Selina are thin enough to slip through the slit window in the lavatory, and Nicholas and Felix are on the roof to assist. The fire escapes have collapsed, rendering them useless. The other girls wait inside, terrified as the building fills with smoke, for fireman to break through the boarded-up skylight. Nicholas is horrified when Selina reenters the burning building. She emerges later with Anne’s Schiaparelli taffeta gown, which the dormitory girls all share among one another. Then, Selina runs off with the gown.

At last, the firemen break through the skylight. They drop down a ladder for the remaining girls to climb up, including Jane. Joanna remains inside, reciting the day’s psalm as though in a trance. By the time she finally listens to Nicholas’s pleading and starts to climb up the ladder, it’s too late: the building collapses, taking Joanna with it, and she perishes.

Later, Nicholas meets with Joanna’s father and leads him to the site of Joanna’s death. He praises Joanna’s religious devotion and character. Nicholas searches for Selina in the wake of the tragedy but is unable to find her. Later, he discovers that she’s married to a crooner. He doesn’t care, though, having seen the truth of her superficial, self-interested character when she pulled the stunt with the taffeta gown. He recounts this to Jane and Rudi on V.J. Day (Victory over Japan Day) in August as they wander over to Buckingham Palace to celebrate the victory with other Londoners. In the crowd, Nicholas observes a seaman silently stab a woman in the ribs. She sinks to the floor. Nicholas shouts for help, but no one notices. On the trio’s way out, Nicholas slips the letter Jane (as Charles Morgan) wrote him into the seaman’s pocket. The man doesn’t notice.