The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

ISBN: 978-0-241-95677-9

First published 1961

128 pages

Cover design: Sarah Watts

4/5 Stars

A wonderful book with a wonderful comedic creation of Miss Jean Brodie. Together with her ‘girls’, Monica Douglas, Rose Stanley, Eunice Gardiner, Sandy Stranger, Jenny Gray and Mary Macgregor, Miss Brodie teaches them about art, love, history, the classics and takes a disdaining view on team sports and team spirit. The girls grow up to be individuals.

The book effortlessly flits between time periods, after WW1, after WW2, although set in the early thirties, Miss Brodie meets the girls as a primary school teacher, and continues to counsel them and teach them throughout their secondary school years, with theatre trips and afternoon teas, and museum and art gallery visits. We see Miss Brodie’s affairs of the heart through the children’s eyes.

Muriel Spark gives us wonderful quotations, and freely quotes from playwrights and poets throughout the book:

“Speech is silver but silence is golden.”

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life…”

“My prime has brought me instinct and insight, both.”