This delightful short novel sparked the classic film starring Maggie Smith.
Miss Brodie is a spinster teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s. She has selected a small group of girls to hothouse; she attempts to indoctrinate them with the idea that culture, art and style are more important than practical subjects like arithmetic; she repeatedly praises Mussolini and other European fascists. She frequently sees 'her girls' outside school, including at the house of one of the teachers with whom she is having an affair. This unconventional approach to education puts her into conflict with the school establishment but they haven't any hard evidence to use against her. Miss Brodie's influence extends to attempting to manipulate the sex-lives of the girls as they reach maturity. Eventually one of them betrays her.
Perhaps like a good teacher, this very short novel uses repetition. It has a recursive structure and repeatedly jumps between different times. For example, it starts by introducing the 'Brodie set', the six girls, at the age of sixteen before jumping back to when they were ten and being taught by Miss Brodie. Details about their adults lives are interposed: we know how Mary dies before the end of chapter one. This non-chronological narrative helps focus on the question of who betrayed Miss Brodie and on what grounds. It reminded me of the conversational narrative of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford but this book employs an omniscient narrator telling the tale in the third person past tense so they can't be unreliable ... can they?
The ‘Brodie Bunch’ consist of six girls. They taught my Miss Jean Brodie for just two years, when they are ten and eleven, and her influence stays with them and shapes their characters.
The six girls are introduced in the first chapter. The three most important are Mary, the plump girl who isn't very clever and who always gets the blame; Rose who, we are repeatedly told, is or will become famous for sex; and Sandy, who has a strong interior monologue and is always telling herself stories in which she features as the heroic sidekick of a romantic hero from a novel.
Perhaps like a good teacher, this very short novel uses repetition. It has a recursive structure and repeatedly jumps between different times. For example, it starts by introducing the 'Brodie set', the six girls, at the age of sixteen before jumping back to when they were ten and being taught by Miss Brodie. Details about their adults lives are interposed: we know how Mary dies before the end of chapter one. This non-chronological narrative helps focus on the question of who betrayed Miss Brodie and on what grounds. It reminded me of the conversational narrative of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford but this book employs an omniscient narrator telling the tale in the third person past tense so they can't be unreliable ... can they?
The ‘Brodie Bunch’ consist of six girls. They taught my Miss Jean Brodie for just two years, when they are ten and eleven, and her influence stays with them and shapes their characters.
The six girls are introduced in the first chapter. The three most important are Mary, the plump girl who isn't very clever and who always gets the blame; Rose who, we are repeatedly told, is or will become famous for sex; and Sandy, who has a strong interior monologue and is always telling herself stories in which she features as the heroic sidekick of a romantic hero from a novel.
A theme of this book is Miss Brodie's belief: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” (Ch 1) [This is a modification of something claimed about Jesuit education; one of the other themes is religion and the tension in Scotland between Calvinism and Roman Catholicism.] On the other hand, as Scottish poet Rabbie Burns said: "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!"
Another theme is that sexual desire inevitably disrupts the development of adolescents, particularly when it is bottled up as it is in the context of a single-sex school. It's also important (and potentially destructive) for spinsters and during the nineteen-thirties there were a lot of women left high and dry after their potential or actual partners had been killed during the First World War.
Selected quotes:
Pronouncements of Miss Jean Brodie:
- “I am putting old heads on your young shoulders ... and all my pupils are the crème de la crème.” (Ch 1)
- “These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.” (Ch 1)
- “You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.” (Ch 1)
- “There must needs be a leaven in the lump.” (Ch 5)
- “Mary Macgegor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire.” (Ch 1)
- “Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored.” (Ch 2)
- “Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.” (Ch 2) She does indeed look like that!
- “She was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. ... They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbors the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford group and put spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test.” (Ch 3)
- “The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.” (Ch 3)
- “Those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.” (Ch 3)
- “She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from outside during any arithmetic periods when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic.” (Ch 3)
- “Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long preserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before time. She said, ‘ I am past my prime’.” (Ch 3)
- “Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were the squares on the other two sides.” (Ch 4)
- “There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.” (Ch 4)
- Calvinism, in the opinion of one of the characters, is the "belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.” (Ch 5)
- “Miss Brodie ... had elected herself to grace in so particular way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn't stand it anymore.” (Ch 5)
- “It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as Informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea.” (Ch 5)
I did the maths problem mention in chapter four. It seems to me that the two questions are the same. "c.g." stands for centre of gravity (now called centre of mass) which is the place you would have to hold the ladder to keep it horizontal. By taking moments you can calculate that you would need to support the ladder 4.5 feet from the bucket.
It's an entertaining novel and an easy read yet it manages to explore in depth the characters of Miss Brodie and Sandy. Deservedly a classic.
It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the best 100 English novels since Time began (1923)
Other Muriel Spark novels reviewed in this blog:
- Memento Mori (1959)
- The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
- A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
Originally published in 1961 by the New Yorker in the USA and by Macmillan in the UK
My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 2000
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