The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
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First published in 1961, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliantly controlled and sharply comic novel set in an Edinburgh girls’ school during the 1930s. At its centre is Jean Brodie, an unconventional teacher who considers herself to be in her prime and selects a small group of pupils, known as the Brodie set, to receive her particular attention. With her passionate admiration for art, romance and Fascist Italy, Miss Brodie encourages her girls to look beyond the restrictions of conventional education, while gradually exerting an unsettling influence over their lives. Through the recollections of her former pupils, particularly Sandy Stranger, Spark explores the complicated relationship between devotion and manipulation, individuality and authority, innocence and experience.
Told through a distinctive, shifting chronology, the novel reveals its characters and their fates with extraordinary economy, allowing irony and foreboding to coexist with wit. Spark draws on the political tensions of the interwar years to examine charisma, ideology, betrayal and the dangers of allowing one personality to dominate another. One of the defining works of twentieth-century Scottish literature, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie remains a masterful study of influence and self-deception, and the novel that secured Spark's place among the most original British writers of her generation.
From the book
“Miss Brodie stood in her brown dress like a gladiator with raised arm and eyes flashing like a sword.”
— Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
On The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
“Near perfect in its design and execution.”
— Scottish Review of Books