Girls without resources

Shortly after the Second World War, London is timidly awakening from the lean war years. The residents of the city's 'women's hostels', the charitable May of Teck Club, are breathing in freedom and are hungry for new dresses, new men, a new life. But the metropolis remains scarred by the war, goods are rationed, and the girls discover that evil thrives even in times of peace.

In the novella, the author draws on her repeated stays at the Helena Club, a women's boarding house in Edinburgh, which she was forced into due to a lack of funds. The prose captures the efforts of a group of young women to secure an independent existence and find their way in a new world – with Spark addressing serious themes of morality, religion, and poetry in the form of a social comedy, demonstrating her distinctive, concise phrasing, the art of subtle suggestion, and a sense of humour and tragedy devoid of sentimentality or pathos.