THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS <i> by Muriel Spark (Avon: $7.95) </i> : THE VARIETY ARTISTES <i> by Tom Wakefield (Serpent’s Tail: $10.95) </i> : THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY <i> by Fay Weldon (Penguin: $7.95) </i>

These three British novels focus on women using the limited resources at their disposal to confront dire crises.

Like a tongue-in-cheek Gibbon, Muriel Spark, the author of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” chronicles the final days of the Princess May of Teck Club, a London hostel for “Ladies of Slender Means Below the Age of Thirty Years.” The opening sentence--”Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions”--sets the tone for this sly examination of women’s lives at the end of World War II, when job opportunities were almost as limited as salaries. The inhabitants of the club cope as best they can, swapping ration coupons, changing jobs and boyfriends and sharing their single evening gown, a legacy of someone’s rich aunt. Spark weaves several stories into a sort of Not-So-Grand Hotel, with a mock-tragic ending.

Lydia Poulton, the central character of “The Variety Artistes,” recalls Noel Coward’s Mrs. Wentworth-Brewster, a comfortable, pillowy widow, who discovers her life is not over, as her dreary children had led her to believe. A series of encounters with a retired coal miner, a nervous young professor who’s courting her granddaughter and a frantic American widow enable Lydia to rediscover her capacity for love, nurturing and friendship. The message of Tom Wakefield’s book is nothing more weighty than “life needn’t be gray,” but it’s a cozy story to enjoy with a cup of tea and scones.

Fay Weldon’s award-winning novel is a brighter, more ambitious work, with a zany, first-person narration provided by Sonia, a former welfare mother confined to a mental institution. The humorous tone contrasts oddly with numerous bitter diatribes against “the villainy of men.” Although Sonia blames all the world’s evils on the male sex, Weldon has hardly written a feminist manifesto: All the female characters in “Country”--including Sonia--are ignorant, stupid and/or spineless. That Weldon somehow manages to make these vapid people seem entertaining represents a triumph of literary style over content.