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The Girls of Slender Means
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The Girls of Slender Means

novel by Spark
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Article History

The Girls of Slender Means, novel by Muriel Spark, published in a shortened version in 1963 in The Saturday Evening Post and published in book form later that year.

The novel, set primarily in London during World War II, focuses on the inhabitants of a residential club for unmarried women and on the friendship of several of them with a young man named Nicholas Farringdon. When tragedy strikes and 13 of the women are killed, Nicholas realizes that there is no safety anywhere, especially for those on whom fortune had once seemed to smile. This epiphany stimulates his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Years later, he dies a missionary in Haiti.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.