The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

Published 1963 · 40 pages · 32,899 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Satirical Fiction

How hard is The Girls of Slender Means to read?

The Girls of Slender Means scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
Spark employs a sophisticated, precise vocabulary with occasional literary or specialized terms like 'débutante,' 'elocution,' 'hypotaxis,' or 'raison d'être.' While not laden with archaic words or extensive jargon like 'Moby-Dick' (72), the prose is notably more elevated than accessible contemporary fiction, requiring a solid grasp of English nuances.
Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
Sentences in 'The Girls of Slender Means' are frequently long and multi-clausal, often incorporating parenthetical asides and lists that demand sustained attention. The author's controlled, elegant prose, while not as labyrinthine as Jamesian hypotaxis ('The Golden Bowl' 88), presents a higher grammatical challenge than direct, declarative styles like '1984' (35).
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
The novel blends a concrete narrative of post-war London life with significant philosophical and theoretical content, particularly through Nicholas Farringdon's anarchist writings and Joanna Childe's poetic recitations. Spark's detached narrative voice also offers abstract social commentary, elevating the specific events to broader reflections on poverty, illusion, and human nature, similar to '2666' (65) in its probing of meaning.
Information density: 72 out of 100
Spark's prose is remarkably dense, packing rapid character introductions, social commentary, historical context, and philosophical digressions into a lean narrative. The quick pacing of events, especially the fire and rescue, combined with the layering of conceptual information and the author's ironic observations, demands close attention to fully grasp the rich texture, exceeding the density of 'The Great Gatsby' (48).
Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
The narrator is omniscient and frequently offers direct social commentary or character insights, such as stating Jane's 'incorrectly subscribing to a belief that she was capable of thought.' However, a sophisticated layer of indirection exists through the narrator's detached, ironic tone and the early revelation of Nicholas Farringdon's death, which requires readers to infer the significance of past events in light of a known future. This creates a subtle gap between what is stated and what must be inferred about deeper meanings and motivations, placing it above direct exposition like '1984' but below the deep unreliability of 'Lolita'.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
The text is rich with recurring symbols that carry significant thematic weight beyond their literal presence. The May of Teck Club itself functions as a microcosm of post-war society, while objects like the shared Schiaparelli dress symbolize aspiration and collective identity, and the slit window represents escape and illicit freedom. The unexploded bomb in the garden, which eventually detonates, is a potent symbol of lingering danger and the past's inescapable influence, making the symbolic layer more pronounced than in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' but less pervasive than 'Moby-Dick'.
Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
Spark's narrative voice is consistently and profoundly ironic, creating a significant gap between the text's surface statements and the author's implied meaning. This is evident in the narrator's detached observations of characters' pretensions, such as Selina's 'Poise is perfect balance' mantra contrasted with her actions, or Jane's 'intellectually glamorous' self-perception. The entire framing of Nicholas's 'martyrdom' and the subsequent scramble for his manuscript is presented with a dry, cynical wit that requires constant reader recalibration, placing it closer to 'Lolita' in its sophisticated irony.
Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
While the narrative follows a chronological sequence within its 1945 setting, it deliberately withholds full resolution and meaning. Nicholas Farringdon's death is revealed in the opening, but the precise circumstances and its ultimate significance are explored ambiguously throughout the text. Selina Redwood's fate after the fire, and the meaning of Nicholas's final, seemingly pointless gesture, remain open to interpretation, creating a strong sense of ambiguity that exceeds 'The Great Gatsby's' open meaning but is less absolute than 'Waiting for Godot'.
Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
The novel employs a non-linear structure, opening with the revelation of Nicholas Farringdon's death and then flashing back to the events of 1945, with repeated phone calls about his death interjected throughout the past narrative. The omniscient narrator frequently foreshadows future events or characters' ultimate fates, creating a fragmented chronology and shifting perspectives between characters' limited understanding and the narrator's broader, future-knowing view. This is more complex than a linear narrative like 'War and Peace' but less experimental than 'Flights' or 'Ulysses'.

How The Girls of Slender Means is regarded

The Girls of Slender Means holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Girls of Slender Means sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (61 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Girls of Slender Means scores 76 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.22. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
There was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene, it would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon
Symbol: Formal
Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene.
Mythos: Irony iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
The house sank into its centre; a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories.

Where the story of The Girls of Slender Means takes place

  • London, 1945, the main setting
  • The May of Teck Club, Kensington, 1945, the main setting
  • May of Teck Club, Kensington, London, May-August 1945
  • Later London, telephone frame: news of Nicholas's martyrdom in Haiti (1960 to 1965)

5 things that are true of The Girls of Slender Means, with the passage for each

  1. The slit window to the roof measures seven inches by fourteen.

    The aperture was seven inches wide by fourteen inches long.

  2. A stand-in letter-writer for Rudi is paid for forged fan letters, at five shillings for the first page in the author's own hand.

    For a letter in the author’s own handwriting Rudi paid five shillings for the first page and a shilling thereafter.

  3. Twenty-eight minutes pass between the garden explosion and the point where Nicholas helps girls through the window.

    Twenty-eight minutes had passed since the bomb had exploded in the garden.

  4. Joanna measures the other trapped girls' hips with a tape, and the club knows the maximum that fits the window.

    It was known all through the club that thirty-six and a quarter inches was the maximum for hips that could squeeze themselves through it,

  5. Joanna dies when the house collapses as she climbs the ladder.

    The house sank into its centre; a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it.

Scenes in The Girls of Slender Means that Frye would name

34 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
The house sank into its centre; a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it. Joanna's death, the sacrificial scene of the book.
Anagnorisis, untitled
It was the Schiaparelli dress. The coat-hanger dangled from the dress like a headless neck and shoulders. Nicholas sees what Selina has risked herself for, and the grotesque recognition triggers his involuntary signing of the cross.
Sparagmos, untitled
As the sloping roof began to cave in, he leapt clear, landing badly and painfully on the flat roof-top. The house is torn apart as the rescue fails, the book's central dismemberment.
Sparagmos, untitled
it was then that the rumbling began to assert itself from the garden below, mounting swiftly to a mighty crash. The unexploded bomb detonates and breaks the world of the club.
Anagnorisis, untitled
a vision of evil may be as effective to conversion as a vision of good The note in Nicholas's manuscript names the cause of his conversion, reframing the book's central question.
Sparagmos, untitled
slid a knife silently between the ribs of a woman who was with him. A casual stabbing on V.J. night repeats the savagery against the body in the celebrating crowd.

Books that share these scenes with The Girls of Slender Means

About the author

Muriel Spark