“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie“ by Muriel Spark - review

 “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie“ by Muriel Spark:

The novel, published first in 1960, centers on the downfall of the fascinating schoolmistress Jean Brodie who ultimately and tragically will suffer for her hubris. 

Miss Brodie is a passionate, free-thinking and unconventional teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of “special girls“ at Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh in the 1930s. They are the Brodie set and she wants them to be the crème de la crème. The novel’s theme is the education of six distinctive girls and the drama that leads to Miss Brodie’s “betrayal” which results in the dismissal from Marcia Blaine by her great enemy, the headmistress, Miss Mackay. 

Miss Brodie is a complex person, she is narcissistic, excessively self-confident, kind, selfish, considerate, moody and happy all at the same time. With her gift of mysterious glamour and charm she dazzles and seduces her girls, but these qualities lead also to her downfall. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” she boasts, “and she is mine for life.” She needs her girls as an extension of herself to live out missed dreams of her own. 

Like many of her contemporaries in the aftermath of World War I, she found that eligible men were rare. Having lost her first love to the war, Miss Brodie transforms her sexual affection into an affection for her students. In her unconventionality she spins out ever and ever more elaborate tales to them of her dead lover, she insists that Giotto was the greatest Italian artist and Mussolini a subject for adoration. She introduces them to the secrets of cosmetics, visits concerts, ballet and theater performances with them and tries, in short to make them Europeans instead of dowdy little provincial Edinburgh dwellers. Her undisciplined and unstructured pedagogical approach includes unreflected fascism as well as Tennyson. She is a product of her time.

She preaches that art, beauty and goodness should come before philosophy and science. What Miss Brody is looking for is the absolute, an endeavour bound to fail. Although Brodie claims education is “a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul”, she is actually a rigid dogmatist centered in calvinistic thinking.

Miss Brodie has triumphantly entered her "prime." Of this she speaks with such great conviction that to her girls it becomes a great vitality, a visible presence. 

The novel moves back and forth in time. We follow the six girls (Monica, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, and Eunice) of Miss Brodie's "set", all famous for excellency in something, be it mathematics, sex, insight or sport. We follow them from year ten to their eighteenth, but we also get glimpses of their middle age and look back at Miss Brodie from beyond her prime, after her betrayal and finally learn of her death. Gradually we piece together the lastly fateful connection between the domineering teacher and her favourite pupil Sandy who, before she becomes Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, initiates the betrayal that will doom her teacher to an embittered and solitary spinsterly retirement, brooding on who could have betrayed her. She never finds out and dies soon after. 

As much we find fault in Brodies character and convictions, we cannot help but like her. There is lightness as well as dark to Jean Brodie. The point of the novel is not to give solid answers on what is right  and what is wrong. The reader is left with the task to work out a way for himself to deal with moral ambiguity. In this the book, like any great classic, is ageless and pleases and perplexes with every new reading.

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