Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Book at Bedtime

Audiobooks

Podcasts

Drama

Readings from modern classics, new works by leading writers and world literature

Readings from modern classics, new works by leading writers and literature from around the world

BBC Radio 4 Extra

BBC Radio 4 LW

Book at Bedtime: The Girls of Slender Means

Emilia Fox

Muriel Spark

Sally Marmion

Justine Willett

Book at Bedtime: The Girls of Slender Means: Episode 2: This Marvellous Dress

The Girls of Slender Means

Episode 2

Episode 2: This Marvellous Dress

This Marvellous Dress

BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime, The Girls of Slender Means, This Marvellous Dress

During her 'brain work', Jane encounters writer and anarchist Nicholas Farringdon.

During her 'brain work' Jane encounters writer and anarchist Nicholas Farringdon whose arrival at the May of Teck Club causes something of a stir. From December 2014.

'Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenuous, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means.'

Emilia Fox reads Muriel Spark's rapier-witted portrait of the lives and loves of a group of genteel but down-at-heel young women in postwar London. In the so-called May of Teck Club, a boarding house for single ladies, life carries on as if the world were back to normal: elocution lessons, poetry recitals, jostling over suitors and the sharing of a single taffeta gown. But the war has ended and things are not normal and never again will be. Into this world arrives Nicholas Farringdon, a writer and anarchist, who is beguiled by these girls of slender means and their giddy, carefree lives. This meeting, we soon learn, will end in his death.

Today: During her 'brain work', Jane encounters writer and anarchist, Nicholas Farringdon, whose arrival at the May of Teck Club causes something of a stir.

Spark's 1963 novel, Girls of Slender Means, has become a modern classic. AL Kennedy has called it: 'An uncompromisingly well-crafted book: lean, ironic, funny, penetrating, unsettling and very, very beautiful. Welcome to the English language as operated by an expert.'

Muriel Spark was an award-winning Scottish novelist and biographer, known best for her acclaimed novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Reader: Emilia Fox
Abridger: Sally Marmion
Producer: Justine Willett.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Muriel Spark's rapier-witted portrait of genteel young women's lives in postwar London.

Muriel Spark's rapier-witted portrait of genteel young women's lives in postwar London. Read by Emilia Fox. Abridged by Sally Marmion.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Book at Bedtime

The Girls of Slender Means

Episode 2: This Marvellous Dress

Contributors

Genres

Formats

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4