by Muriel Spark
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Product Description
The elegantly styled classic story of a young, unorthodox teacher and her special--and ultimately dangerous--relationship with six of her students.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A book best enjoyed by those in their prime, 2008-07-14
Don't give up on this book if you don't like it the first time you read it. It improves with age...your age.
At 14, I just didn't "get" the book. Going to an English all-girls' school I could absolutely identify with the opening passage relating to the dreaded Panama hat, and like many of the girls in the book, boys to us were pretty much a foreign country. However, apart from those aspects I felt the book was irrelevant and rather dated compared to my school days in the late 1970s.
Twenty plus years later, I came across the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie again, and understood its power.
For such a slim volume, this book has remarkable depth, and other reviewers have done a tremendous job of outlining the story. Jean Brodie was not a frustrated spinister in general terms, but she was frustrated and bound by the conventions of that era, however daring she appeared to be at times. Her passion was her girls; to shape their minds, broaden their horizons, and to be honest, share her view of the world.
This a book that works once you understand more about life. To learn that however passionately you may believe in something, in hindsight some things are not all we understood them to be, but to never lose that passion.
Most of all, to know that one's prime is a state of mind, not an age.
I've read it several times now, and alongside Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), it is my favourite book from that era.
There is also an excellent film, whilst not entirely true to the book, has Maggie Smith in probably her best performance, and definitely worth watching. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Hippy of the 1930's -- Chapter 3 described it all [76][T], 2008-03-09
Imaginatively asking and answering questions to and for her students, protagonist Miss Brodie leads her set of six young women from the ages of 10 to 18 -- a journey that they define to be the "main influence of their school days."
Each girl in the set is different. Like the seven dwarfs, you could nickname the six girls: Rose Stanley (Sexy); Monica Douglas (Brainy); Eunice Gardner (Splits); Sandy Stranger (Pscho); Jenny Gray (Actor) and Mary MacGregor (Sleepy). This eclectic group of naive minds are entranced by the nouveau concepts and manners of Miss Brodie - a uniquely gregarious and open character of the feminine gender in the 1930's Scotland.
Chapter 3 starts with a definition of this woman and her peers. "It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime. . . there were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties. . . who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion." Such "normal women of the 1930's", who otherwise would be anomalies in their society, were brain trusts which excited and engaged the minds of their students. The author had such a role model with a Christina Kay whose personality was the foundation of this fictional character.
Amid the book, as the girls mature in age and mind, the secret society of the "set" grows stronger with Miss Brodie. They behave - say little (Speaking is silvery, silence is golden.) and reticently defy all inquiries by the headmistress of the school who only suspects the worst of Miss Brodie. She has sexual discussions with the "set" and liaisons with men. She is a free sexual being.
Adding to the sexual revolution of Miss Brodie is her political endorsement of America's and England's worst enemies: Italy's Fascism and Germany's Nazism. She even feels empathy toward Franco's socialist movement - Miss Brodie was not the common teacher at an upperclass girls' school in England, then or even now.
The administration's continual calumnious attack on Brodie's character fails, until she is betrayed by one of the "set." Miss Brodie, thought to be omnipotent, and who felt "my prime has brought me instinct and insight" fails to see the betrayal.
Juxtaposing the eight years among the girls, and adding their later years as well, the story comes to and fro about the interpersonal relationships, the associations between half truths and lies, as well as explanations for some stories or anecdotes delivered by Brodie to the girls. This is not a chronological recitation of the witch hunt by the administration against Brodie. Instead, the writing is a mosaic which abstractly tells this detailed story in a minimalist manner. It is a delight to read, a story beautifully told.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Hmm..., 2007-12-02
This book is definitely a unique read. It is not afraid to "tell it like it is," you may say. However, I found myself wanting to like the characters, especially Jean Brodie, much more than I actually did. I'm not saying that none of the characters were likeable, but I did have a difficult time feeling any sympathy or compassion for any of them.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Superb, 2007-09-22
This is art. There is not one unnecessary word in this novel. Miss Brodie is a mystery throughout the story and you just go on pondering about the characters long after it is finished.
And, you: Watch the film starring Maggie Smith, too. It's absolutely a masterpiece.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Portrait of a fascist, 2007-07-01
The key events in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE take place in Scotland in the unsettled time between the two World Wars. In a number of ways, the title character, a school mistress in an Edinburgh girls school, is a lot like two world figures she admits to admiring: Mussolini and Hitler. While being arbitrary and authoritarian herself, she exhibits contempt for all legitimate authority. While claiming to educate her students in the true sense of the word (i.e., to draw them out), she constantly labels and confines them by her preconceptions of what she believes their destinies to be. She also manipulates their trust, inappropriately shares adult information with them, and constantly tests their loyalty. Brodie's set, as the girls are referred to by the headmistress and other "outsiders", are a privileged elite, the creme de la creme. And privilege comes with both responsibilities and risks. Spark gives a subtle reading of what it means to bask in the not-always-healthy favor of an all-too-human leader. While the novel sometimes seems to be told from the point of view of one of Brodie's students (the second half seems to belong almost entirely to Sandy, the girl with piggish eyes who becomes a nun and author of a bestselling book of psychology called "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"), it is really told by an omniscient narrator, one capable of bridging time and making judgments no individual character with a limited perspective could ever make. It leaves the reader feeling that there just might be a power greater than the most naive victim or the most desperate, self-serving bully. This is truly a deep and disturbing book, one that should not be approached lightly or taken at face value.
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