Muriel Spark
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is a classic that is as fresh today as it was when first published in the 1960s.
Set in Scotland in the 1930s, it portrays an eccentric Scottish teacher in an Edinburgh girls’ school who singles out a select group of students for her unique style of education. Known as the Brodie set, the six girls are subjected to Jean Brodie’s views on education, her passions, her sharp reprimands, her biting wit, her constant reminders that she is in her prime, her love of all things Italian, and her sympathies with fascism. She spins tales of her love life—real or imagined—and exerts considerable influence on her girls.
Woven seamlessly into the narrative are flash forwards of the girls from the time they are ten years old until they are eighteen and beyond, at which time Brodie’s influence has begun to wane. In brief authorial intrusions, we learn of the girls’ careers, marriages, and, in the case of one young girl, her untimely death, and in the case of another, her entrance into a nunnery.
Spark’s depiction is laced with biting satire, wit, and humor. Her genius lies in depicting Jean Brodie through the eyes of other characters while simultaneously denying access to her interiority. Our knowledge of Jean Brodie is restricted to how others see her and to what she articulates.
In Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark has created an unforgettable character—a manipulative, opinionated, incorrigible, charismatic, egotistical, and self-righteous woman who abuses her authority as a teacher to mold impressionable young minds in her image. Although we are denied access to her thoughts unless she articulates them, Jean Brodie emerges as life-like and recognizable. Thanks to the genius of Muriel Spark, Jean Brodie steps of the page as one of the most unforgettable characters in literature.