Having introduced you to author Muriel Spark here and here, today we revisit with a look at her novella, The Girls of Slender Means. The scene is the May of Teck Club, a boardinghouse for young single women trying their luck in London. Life at the Club includes a dinner hour, meetings about rules and, occasionally, a guest speaker. As the title suggests, nobody [...]
If you have any use for author biographies (and I do) and you are able to hold up five pounds of book with one spread-open hand in, say, the bathtub, you may enjoy Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark: The Biography. We’ve discussed Spark’s Memento Mori here. You can expect more of her novels to come up on this blog. And you can always catch the [...]
The action starts when an aging Brit picks up the phone and hears a mysterious voice on the other end: “Remember you must die.” Pretty soon, multiple characters in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori receive these pesky calls. I wasn’t sure I would like a book filled with wrinkly oldsters taking tea and answering nuisance calls. But it wasn’t long before Dame Lettie, Mrs. Pettigrew [...]
