What Kind of Woman is Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was the first of Dame Muriel Spark’s work that I had picked up. I did so at the mention of this little novel by Julian. Agatha had given me Spark’s work Symposium (think Plato) a few years back, but I tried to pick it up, did not get it, and put it down again until recently. It, like most of Spark’s novels I have read, is darkly hilarious. I told Agatha recently that I always feel a strange sense of dark satisfaction when I finish a Spark novel. But PRIME is more serious. It has very subtly hysterical moments, but it treats something far more serious – the formation of human souls, life and death and Divine justice. When I first read it, (and I devoured in a day), I did not quite get it. In fact, I had to ask Agatha, who told me “Brodie actually tries to form them (rather than to educate--"from the latin, to draw out") in her image (or the image she's imagined for them). Still, in spite of Brodie's efforts, the girls turn out." Well, that remark required a second read – and a closer one. So I did. All the while, I had to ask myself – who is Jean Brodie? What is the vocation of the teacher? What are we capable of doing to one another?

Miss Jean Brodie is a bit of a mystery. We don’t know much about her. We know that she was a student in Edinburgh who had a silly land lady and that she travels the world to share it with her girls. She had a great love once, a young man who died in the first Great War. She is now a “progressive spinster,” one of the many “legions of her kind during the nineteen thirties” who had lost their loves to the War (p. 43). She is a new feminist of the age, the kind who “talked to men as man-to-man.” (p. 44)

In the traditional Marcia Blaine all girls school of Edinburgh, Miss Brodie is a bit of a brave rebel and not well liked by her co-workers. Indeed, the head mistress Miss Mackay constantly badgers the Brodie set for information she can use to fire Miss Brodie. In this way, the reader must admire Miss Brodie. She is bold, brilliant, and lovely with her “dark Roman profile” who declares that she will never the leave the school – “she would have to be assassinated.” (p. 6) *Spoiler* One of the last scenes in the movie version of Prime portrays Miss Brodie’s dramatic downfall as she screams “Assassin” when Miss Mackay finally obtains information to fire her.

But early on the in novel Spark leaves us with no doubt that all is not aright in the world of Miss Jean Brodie. In one breath, she utters that “Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first,” and in the next breath, she teaches her girls that Mussolini’s fascisti will solve the world’s problems along with Hitler’s Nazis. And Miss Brodie could only admit after the war that “Hitler was rather naughty.” (p.131)

What follows is the tale of Miss Brodie’s romanticism that she can turn her little set of girls – Monica Douglas, famous for her mathematical brain; Rose Stanley, famous for sex simply by virtue of her Venus like demeanor; Eunice Gardiner, famous for athletics; Mary MacGregor, famous for her silence and for being “a nobody whom everybody could blame;” Jenny Gray, famous for her acting skills and best friend to Sandy Stranger, the girl who learns the most from Jean Brodie, famous for her insight – into an image of herself and mold them into whatever she desires – her very own “crème de la crème,” as she conceives herself to be, and in many ways both is and is not.

In my next post, I’ll recap the story of Miss Brodie’s prime and how she tries to form the girls into her own image – and why she fails and why, in my opinion, she ultimately must fail if justice is to be done. For now, enjoy this 30 minute BBC video interview with Muriel Spark that a friend of mine sent to me. I’ve not yet watched it all – but it looks to be promising for those who are interested in learning more about Spark.

Muriel Spark + Jean Brodie

Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie


Dear readers, the Magdalene Sisters, are happy to host this week a "book club." Earlier this summer the three of us read (or re-read) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. Today I'll introduce the novel, and Spark, and then through the week we'll discuss both it and the 1968 film starring Maggie Smith.

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh of a upper-middle class family. Educated at a fine girls day school, she had the reputation from a young age of being a poet. Her path was, for the most part, set out for her by her love of books, words, literature, and learning. She didn't begin writing fiction till she was in her 30s. Her first novel,The Comforters, published when she was 39, was loved by critics (and Evelyn Waugh). But she didn't make it big in the public eye until 1961, when she published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It was adapted into a stage play, and then the highly successful film, which allowed her to live the glamorous literary life she was made for. She continued to write prolifically till her death, on Good Friday in 2006. (I had just discovered Dame Muriel then, which made the date all the more significant.) Graham Greene was a patron of hers in the early days, as he was with many struggling authors.

Before she began writing fiction, she converted to the Roman Catholic faith. I don't mention this because this is a Catholic blog, but because it is actually the key to understanding much of her work. In her auto-biography, Curriculum Vitae, she says very little about the personal side of her conversion. It made sense out of the world, and so she became Catholic, essentially. But she does speak of its import with regards to her writing fiction. It gave her a sense of the whole-ness of life; men are part of a much larger story, controlled by another but still acting freely. The New York Times obit describes her work further:

In her writing, evil is never far away, violence is a regular visitor and death is a constant companion. Her themes were generally serious but nearly always handled with a feather-light touch. ...Some accused her of coolness and even cruelty toward the characters she invented and then sent — sometimes quite merrily — to terrible deaths.

"People say my novels are cruel because cruel things happen and I keep this even tone," she said in an interview in The New Yorker. "I'm often very deadpan, but there's a moral statement too, and what it's saying is that there's a life beyond this, and these events are not the most important things. They're not important in the long run."

Her stories play with the rules of narrative. She rarely tells a story chronologically, but rather plays with flashbacks and divination of the future in a detached all-knowing voice. In her 1970 novel The Driver's Seat we learn in the second chapter that the main character is found the next morning with her wrists tied in silk, and her throat cut. With the ending told, Spark had the freedom to explore questions of will, freedom, providence, and psychology, as well as supernatural themes (some of her stories are downright creepy).

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about a magnetic teacher and her "set"--six girls she dotes on and confides in and treats with a barely cloaked favoritism. Told in the third person, the novel centers on the "dependable" member of the set, Sandy, who, perceptive and detached, sees the subtle interplay between Brodie, her girls, and the two male teachers in love with her. We meet these girls when they are in upper form (highschool), still clearly marked from the time when they were twelve, as "Brodie's set". But soon we are in the classroom, wide-eyed and wondrous, as Miss Brodie is describing her philosophy of life:

"Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me."

"You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime."

"Art is greater than science... Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance."

There is so much to tell about this great novel, and we'll be dedicating our posts this week to it and its intricacies. I also highly recommend the film, which condenses a few of the characters, of course, but is about as good a production one could imagine. The only failing is that it cannot play with narrative they way a narrator/novelist can. Still, I hope you'll find a copy and join in our conversation.