Download The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) eBook

I thought a lot about popular teachers I've had. How charming they can be, how cool and inclusive they can be, and how they have the strong tendency to be tremendous arses.

I adored Miss Jean Brodie. Her fun and artistic atmosphere is a haze around her personality warts, like a keen fascination for twentieth century fascism. Her enlightened diatribes underscore a sharp pettiness, and her five favorite pupils shape their lives in accordance to, and reaction against, her philosophies that can be boiled down to: "Love me."

Originally, I was going to give this 4 stars. The last line is so unnecessarily cliche, the focus wobbles around, and characters that have a lot of color become caricatures towards the end. But the more I think on its faults, the more I realize that the story of Jean Brodie could not have been written any other way. When it comes time to draw a portrait of a former object of affection, a whole messy mix of emotions are bound to come out.

(If you've seen the movie, a lot of the plot beats are the same. But there is definitely some new emotional beats to explore in the text)

Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher at a school for girls in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1930's. Her favorite students, six girls called the Brodie set by most of the school, are the focus of her life. Her unusual teaching methods have created problems with school staff and administration.

I loved this book! Very short at 132 pages, but the characters were so intriguing, and the story was wonderful. Especially Miss Brodie - a complicated and flawed woman. Really fine writing and I recommend it.

Witty, often highly amusing, yet also disturbing, Muriel Spark's novel, despite its brevity, belongs in the classical tradition of novels like Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. It delves into the psychology of a girl whose fascination with her teacher draws her into Miss Brodie's strange psycho-drama and inspires nearly equal and opposite forces of attraction and repulsion. Set against the background of the rise of fascism in the 1930's, the novel shows how the destructive political forces these movements unleashed can exist on the smaller stage of a private girls school. Ultimately, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about the paradoxical power of the imagination to transfigure the world and to disappoint.

After reading the one and two star reviews on Amazon, I think that people don't realize that this is a book about ethics/morals. Miss Brodie looks admirable, but in the end she does harm to her students by teaching her own fantasies as facts. It just is not true that this is a book without plot.

When this novel was published decades ago the Los Angeles Times called it "perfect." I agree. It's short, but satisfying, full of well-wrought characters and placed in a compelling interesting pre-World War II time period, in Scotland. As an author, Muriel Spark makes use of repetition better than any writers I can recall.

A bonus: if anyone has seen the 1969 movie adapted from the book and starring Maggie Smith, you will hear her voice as you read.

This is possibly the perfect Muriel Spark book, compact and devastating and funny. Accessible storytelling with that threatening menacing undertone Spark did so well.

If you want an education in how the movie and novel mediums differ and what works best in each, read this and compare to the genius movie that was based on it.

This book is frequently assigned as class reading and often, the readers are quite young. I read this book as a young woman, then again as a middle aged woman, and now I'm pretty much what you'd call (sigh) a senior and I can sympathize with the issues that students have when they are assigned to read this book. A lot of how you interpret this novel has to do with how you have lived and how long you have lived.

Miss Jean Brodie is a upper-crusty teacher of well-bred "gerrrrls" in an Edinburgh school. This not-beautiful and aging woman, someone who probably let love and life pass by her while she hid in the hermetic world of a Scottish public school had lived a life isolated from most of the hurly-burly (and delicious or painful experiences of Life.) Suddenly, and perhaps illogically, she declares that she is in Her Prime, which is to say she has gained power and experience and discernment, which trump the shallow gifts of youth, beauty and an untrammeled past. Or else, she's putting Cleopatra right down in her place, taking over as The Queen of Denial. Which point of view you choose to believe may have more to do with your own world view than with that of the author or of Miss Jean herself. And, it could very well be both points of view simultaneously--life can be ambiguous.

Miss Brodie's sense of power, if it is truly power, originates from knowing her motivations, her strengths, her foibles and her desires. She acts on these instincts. Some of her power is maternal (though she is unmarried) and she nurtures the best of her girls, the "creme de la creme" as she calls them, as if they were her own daughters. She seizes opportunity for love, she rebels against anyone who tries to reign her in. But, does she over-reach herself or is she being unfairly treated as that most misunderstood of all creatures, a middle-aged, intelligent woman? Or is this a sudden awakening and regret that she has isolated herself from all life has to offer, and is she working off not only frustrated sexuality, but a desire to awaken it vicariously in her "gerrrllls" so they do not fall into the same trap that stifled her? That ambiguity, there it is AGAIN. And as we know from many other works of literature and history, women who seize power, whether she be Hatshepsut the female pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tzu-Hsi, Empress of China, or Catherine the Great are viewed with deep suspicion and even deemed evil by the mostly male dominated historical world. It never ends well for them, and it doesn't end well for Miss Brodie, either.

This is a highly perceptive book, steeped not only in female psychology, the zeitgeist of upper-middle class Scotland of the early 20th Century and also feminist history but it's also a book about regret, aging and a zest for life that cannot be quenched, even in a dry desert of a life. If you have trouble identifying with Miss Jean Brodie because you are young but forced to read it for a school assignment, go back and read about women in history who have bumped up against the Establishment (such as the ones I mentioned, and there are many more) and see if something about Miss Jean Brodie's epic struggle for selfdom don't strike another chord for you. And if you are older, like myself, it can be painful and wonderful to see how a woman like Miss Brodie tries to triumph against her own choices and those choices that seemed right, but ended up with so much regret.