The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is. Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery. This book has a lot of the familiar Spark `feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that `betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other w

Students who are forced to read this slender but pithy novel in high school or university classes often dismiss it was being 'about nothing', or just a dead bore. Which is a shame, as this powerful novel from Muriel Spark is one that needs to be appreciated and taken seriously - and enjoyed - by all readers, whether those in high school or those who lecture on it to classrooms of bored university students. Perhaps the lack of appreciation for this novel by students is the lack of interest with which teachers approach it. Perhaps it hits too close to the bone for many teachers, who, like Miss Brodie, endeavour to shape and form their 'set' and who, perhaps unwittingly, manipulate their students in the worst ways.Whatever the reason, this text is one that should be read and taught ethusiastically, for it packs into its 150-odd pages a deeply comic yet troubling bunch of themes: betrayal, fitting-in, the power of imagination, adultery, and most importantly, the transfiguration of the commonplace. In a way the book is at the same time a paeon to and a curse of the imagination, demonstrating how it can enrich life (such as in the antics of Sandy and Jenny) yet also how it can damage others (such as Miss Brodie's false and manipulative ideas about love, sex, Teddy, Rose and so forth).Muriel Spark writes about things she knows well, in this case teaching, Edinburgh, girls schools, sex and betrayal. A book not only worth reading, but well worth teaching, and an excellent introduction to the works of Spark, whose other works are equally compelling and astute.

As a teacher and department chair, I find myself alternating between Miss Brodie and Miss Mackay in my daily life. The Miss Brodies of the world are fascinating, inspiring creatures--they make us want to learn and to believe in having a mission. Yet, also like Miss Brodie, they can be dangerous, when their style either masks a lack of substance or a very foggy understanding of the implications of the ideologies behind the personalities they embrace. At the same time, while we need Miss Mackays in order to make sure the trains run on time (as it was said of Mussolin, Il Duce, Miss Brodie's own hero), they lack the "spark" (pardon the pun) that make us want to learn--and to teach. How to reconcile the spiritual and the utilitarian in this world--this seems to me to be Spark's theme. Perhaps most intriguing, ultimately, is Sandy herself--the somewhat monstrous amalgam of both Brodie and Mackay. I have been Miss Brodie, in my "prime," yet I also understand the dilemma a Miss Mackay faces--and who, finally, would want to be Miss Mackay, in any case? Perhaps the lesson is to allow, empower our students, our children, to be critical of their education--and thus to learn how to take from each educator the lessons she or he has to offer. The film, by the way, while necessarily making some changes (though giving Teddy Lloyd back his arm seems to me an unfortunate choice), is quite marvelous, with Maggie Smith's performance justly prized, but also featuring fine work from Celia Johnson and Pamela Franklin.