A delightful summer read—well, anytime read actually—is Scottish author Muriel Spark’s 20th-century novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which also has an excellent 1969 film adaptation featuring Dame Maggie Smith. Set in an Edinburgh girls’ school during the 1930s, the story follows a group of students mentored by the unconventional if melodramatic teacher, Jean Brodie. The girls are known at the rather conservative Marcia Blaine School simply as “the Brodie set.”
Jean Brodie sees herself as artistic, poetic, and “deeply emotional,” yet willing to forgo the artistic life and her prime to devote herself to her pupils, “putting old heads on young shoulders” so they become “la crème de la crème.”
She is aware—indeed seems to delight in—how she raises eyebrows among other teachers and especially the school’s straitlaced headmistress, Miss MacKay. Not only does Brodie have borderline scandalous weekend visits to the country home of the music teacher, Mr. Lowther, but she has also been the lover of the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, whose studio is nearby.
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A clash is inevitable.
Miss Brodie suffers classroom visits and check-ins by Miss MacKay, including pat phrases such as, “Safety first!” which Miss Brodie corrects the second Miss MacKay leaves: “Safety is not first. Truth, beauty and goodness come first.”
Her set is comprised principally of five girls—though only four appear in the film—roughly aged 12 at the novel’s start and 18 by the end. However, the text upsets the timeline with flashes both backward and forward, dropping truth bombs on readers in an amusingly understated way.
Jenny is said by Miss Brodie to be the beauty of the group; Rose has instinct and sex appeal, while Monica is more athletic and business oriented. A new arrival, Mary MacGregor, is simple-minded and supremely impressionable. Most important is Sandy, the smart one. Initially, as dutiful a Brodie devotee as the others, Sandy eventually chafes at the teacher’s hold on the girls and especially her vision for their future.
Sandy is also deeply emotional, of course—most young women are—and on one of the group’s visits to the studio, she is suddenly kissed by the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd. An affair ensues, despite his being married with children. Sandy also allows Mr. Lloyd to paint her portrait. Is it all to spite Miss Brodie, who slated Jenny—or Rose—but not Sandy, as the beauty and therefore also the lover?
In time, however, Sandy discovers that all Mr. Lloyd’s portraits, including the one of her, depict Miss Brodie, not the person being painted. Lloyd doesn’t deny his infatuation.
When war comes, Miss Brodie romanticizes fascism as noble, majestic, and artistic. Enamored of Miss Brodie’s views, one of the set leaves to fight and is shortly thereafter killed. Sandy now has more than jealousy to justify bringing Miss Brodie down: She informs headmistress MacKay of Miss Brodie’s fascist sympathies, and Miss Brodie is soon terminated.
The book is Sandy’s retelling of this story, years after she became a nun.
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The book reminds readers of the profound influence teachers can have and the impressionable nature of students—and how the teacher-student relationship can evolve in unexpected and dramatic ways. Children also only dimly understand their own parents when they are young. They have all of adulthood to figure them out. So too with students and teachers.
The book also reminds us that any single action can have many motives—some good, some not. Is Sandy a hero? Or an envious assassin, as the film version puts it? Does her coming-of-age experience—or her possible remorse about it—explain her entry into the religious life?
These intrigues are food for thought for every reader who will be engaged and changed after completing this small but mighty book.
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Image: “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” by Pete Edgeler on Flickr
“She informs headmistress MacKay of Miss Brodie’s fascist sympathies, and Miss Brodie is soon terminated.”
I’m not so sure Miss Brodie would have been the only one in Edinburgh — people hadn’t
seen the evils of National Socialism yet, the same way that people hadn’t seem the evils of Communism until Stalin sent the tanks into Budapest in 1956.
Hitler was welcomed into Austria — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYX_5NK68aU
And it wasn’t just Hitler, it was also Franco and Mussolini. Until one learned the details, these were all very romantic movements. Heck, the Soviet Constitution gave citizens more rights (on paper) than ours does.