Cbr17bingo School
This short novel is considered Muriel Spark’s best work. Set in a girls’ school in Edinburgh in the 1930s, it tells the story of a group of school girls and their influential, charismatic teacher Miss Jean Brodie. “The Brodie Set,” as the girls and their teacher are known, attract envy and suspicion from both students and staff at Marcia Blaine school as Miss Brodie flouts convention and invites her young students into confidences that are deeply inappropriate. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie comes across as both a “coming of age” tale and an allegory about fascism and dissent.
The Brodie Set comprises six girls whom Jean Brodie teaches for two years, when they are 10-12 years old, at Marcia Blaine school. Each girl is “famous” for something, and that fame has been determined by Miss Jean Brodie, even if her assessment is not completely accurate. The student we learn the most about is Sandy Stranger, famous for her “vowel sounds” and notorious for her small eyes. Jean Brodie’s claim to fame is that she is “in her prime.”
“One’s prime is the moment one was born for.”
Brodie later claims that being in her prime means she possesses both instinct and insight, an indicator of her exceptionalism. Jean Brodie is an obnoxious character. She admires Mussolini and Hitler. She believes her opinions and tastes are superior to anyone else’s at the school, including the headmistress Miss Mackay. Mackay is younger than and better educated than Brodie, but Brodie tells her students that the headmistress and other faculty simply want to stuff information into their heads while she is trying to draw knowledge out of them. She ignores the curriculum, encourages the girls to lie if asked what they studied in class that day, and, when they have moved on to the upper school and out of her own classroom, she continues to meet with them socially, often forcing meetings to plan ways to thwart the administration’s attempts to get rid of her. Despite the fact that these girls are teenagers, Brodie reveals information about her love life, encourages grossly inappropriate relationships with a male faculty members, and gives horrible advice about what the girls should be doing in their own lives.
The girls, whom Brodie refers to as “the creme de la creme,” love Brodie’s attention and are fiercely loyal to her. Headmistress Mackay would like to fire Brodie but cannot get the goods on her despite her best efforts at trying to win over or trick the girls. Mackay suspects (rightly) that Brodie is engaged in sexual impropriety but cannot prove it. We know that eventually Brodie gets fired and that one of her “set” provided the information that did her in, but Brodie cannot figure out who the traitor was.
The reader, however, knows who it is long before the official reveal. The journey to this character’s “treason” is interesting reading. Jean Brodie loves power and attention, and she knows how to attract pliable followers. Even when they are mature adults and Jean Brodie has died, most of the Brodie Set cannot see how awful she was. They remember how interesting and exciting it was to be in her orbit. The traitor’s fate is very interesting to me but I don’t want to spoil this book for anyone interested in picking it up. It is not much more than 100 pages long and can easily be read in a day. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a surprisingly appropriate read for our current world.