The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

In searching for books about and set in Scotland, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark, was on virtually every list I encountered and since I had not yet read it, I did.

Set in Edinburgh in the 1930s and published in 1962, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie surprised me in how much I disliked it while I was reading it but came to like it later, while I was trying to figure out what to say about it. 

Synopsis: Jean Brodie is a forty-something attractive, single teacher at a girls school in Edinburgh. She teaches the middle grade girls--the 11–13-year-olds. She is unconventional in that she doesn't drill her class on the fundamentals but rather wants to instill in them an appreciation and understanding of what she considers high culture and art--classical music, poetry, classical literature, Renaissance art. She selects a set of girls from her class to become her favorites, "her set," and she takes them to concerts and other outings, including tea in her flat. 

The school administration disapproves of Miss Brodie's approach to teaching and the fact that she has a set of girls who are loyal to her even as they age out of her classes and move to the senior school. The head mistress tries for years to figure out how to get Miss Brodie to "retire early" and tries to get girls from her set to "betray" her by sharing secrets about her sex life. All the girls know that she is in love with a married man, the art teacher, but having an affair with a single man, the music teacher. The girls never bow to the headmistress's pressure to spill what they know. However, one girl does tell the headmistress that Miss Brodie admires the fascists who are gaining power in Italy and Germany, and that is all the headmistress needs to finally boot Miss Brodie from the school.

 I started this book assuming that I would like Jean Brodie and feel awful for the way she was treated. This was not the case. I disliked Miss Brodie intensely--she is arrogant, self-satisfied, selfish, vain, and manipulative. As a teacher, she cared not about actually helping her students but in having them do well in order to make her shine all the brighter. Her love for Mussolini and Hitler and her admiration for their Black Shirts and Brown Shirts was repulsive. She talks about being in her prime--that is, she is at the peak of her beauty, knowledge, intellectual prowess and she is gracing her students with her gifts while she is in her prime.

The writing was interesting in that the narrator never gets us inside Miss Brodie's head, but rather we see what she does and says, often second hand, not what she thinks.

The narrator pegs or labels each of the girls based on Miss Brodie's assessment, and they are stuck with those labels: Eunice was athletic, Jenny was theatrical, Mary was stupid, Monica was known for sex, Rose was beautiful, and Sandy had "little piggy eyes" and fantasized a lot, living out stories in her head.  And the narrator repeated these descriptions often, reminding me of the "wine-dark sea" of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These girls were reduced to the labels Miss Brodie attached to them, and in the novel they never have a life apart from the label, except for Sandy who becomes the "one who betrayed her."

When I finished the book, I gave it three stars. After thinking about it for a while, I've upped my rating to four stars. The book is not really about Miss Jean Brodie and the Scottish or Edinburgh school system. It is an allegory for how charismatic leaders can create loyal followers who will blindly support them even when they are shown to be less than perfect. 

Written thirty years after the rise of fascism in Europe and almost twenty years after WWII ended, it seems to be an attempt to demonstrate how easily a fascist leader like Mussolini or Hitler could convince seemingly reasonable and rational people to do heinous things.

It is a sobering tale, relevant now in the US like never before. Not a fun book to read, but a powerful message. Maybe it is a five-star book after all.

I've never seen the movie, starring Maggie Smith. I wonder how true to the book it is.