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Book at Bedtime: The Girls of Slender Means

Muriel Spark

Book at Bedtime: The Girls of Slender Means: Episode 5: It Was all a Question of Time

The Girls of Slender Means

Episode 5

Episode 5: It Was all a Question of Time

It Was all a Question of Time

BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime, The Girls of Slender Means, It Was all a Question of Time

As tragedy strikes the May of Teck Club, time is running out for some of the girls.

As tragedy strikes the May of Teck Club, time is running out for some of the 'girls of slender means'. From January 2015.

'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 impoverished 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 anachist, 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: As tragedy strikes the May of Teck Club, time is running out for some of the 'girls of slender means'.
Spark's 1963 novel, The Girls of Slender Means, has become a modern classic. Muriel Spark was an award-winning Scottish novelist and biographer, known best for her acclaimed novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

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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.

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