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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Introduction

In her 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark brings to life an eccentric, egocentric, and charming teacher in a private Edinburgh school during the 1930s. Miss Brodie’s six students, known collectively as “the Brodie set,” move through the grades. Miss Brodie sabotages school curriculum as she grandstands her own passions, both personal and academic. She colludes with her students regarding her status in the school and trouble she has with the headmistress. Miss Brodie is memorable for these students, recalled in their later lives, as repeated flash-forwards reveal.

Indeed, it is in putting this 1930s story in personal and historical perspective that some of its darker meaning emerges. In the pre–World War II days, autocratic, orderly, and foolish Miss Brodie is infatuated with Mussolini and Hitler. Inclined to think of herself as European, Miss Brodie praises fascism, her very taste for it a sign of her cultivation. Deluded by the appeal of absolute domination, with its apparent order and efficiency, Miss Brodie forgets that each person, however low and powerless, is a human being with rights. In her ridicule of Mary Macgregor, in her irresponsible direction to Joyce Emily Hammond to go off and fight for Franco, and in her attempt to sexually manipulate Rose Stanley, Miss Brodie sets morality aside and denies the humanity of her students. Mary’s death in a fire in 1943 connects this denial to the greater obscenity occurring at the same time on the Continent in the death camps. In sum, readers are at first charmed and amused, and then jolted into pondering the serious, indeed dangerous, side of this nostalgic portrait of the 1930s and pubescent childhood.

 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Summary

Chapter 1

Boys on bikes talk to five sixteen-year-old, fourth-form school girls, who are distinguished from one another by the way they wear their panama hats. These girls, along with one other, form “the Brodie set,” a select group formed six years before when they were Miss Brodie’s elementary-level pupils.

In their conservative 1930s Edinburgh school, Miss Brodie is known for teaching unconventional subjects. Her students have heard of “Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters . . . and the word ‘menarche.’” They count on their fingers, albeit quite accurately. Miss Brodie’s set has by now adapted to the more orthodox curriculum of the upper grades, but they continue to be connected to each other through their friendship to their former teacher, whom the headmistress and others find highly suspicious. Miss Brodie boasts that she is “putting old heads on [their] young shoulders,” and she affirms, “all [her] pupils are the crème de la crème.”

Miss Brodie’s set bears the imprint of their teacher and, like her, are famous, ostracized, and suspected of disloyalty. The set comprises Monica Douglas, a prefect and math expert; Rose Stanley, “famous for sex”; Eunice Gardiner, a “glamorous” swimmer and “spritely” gymnastics student; Sandy Stranger, “notorious for her small, almost nonexistent, eyes”; Sandy’s best friend, Jenny Gray, known for her elocution and plans to become an actress; and finally, Mary Macgregor, the “silent lump, a nobody whom everybody could blame.” The rich but delinquent Joyce Emily Hammond, a transfer student, tags along hoping in vain to become a member of the set.

Miss Brodie invites the set to dinner, revealing that there is “a new plot . . . to force [her] to resign.” These students are in her confidence, while other staff members are not. Some members of the faculty think Miss Brodie’s style would fit a more progressive school, but Miss Brodie, who is in her “prime,” is intent on remaining at Blaine, where she works as “a leaven in the lump.” Like Julius Caesar, Spark writes, Miss Brodie can only be removed from her post by assassination.

The chapter concludes with a history lesson that Miss Brodie gives this set six years earlier, when they are ten, she is forty, and the year is 1930. She tells them the story of her lover, Hugh, who was at that time twenty-two years of age (six years younger than Miss Brodie). Hugh was killed the week before Armistice in 1918. Hugh, a countryman, had proposed to Miss Brodie, anticipating that they would have a quiet life together. It is an autumn day when Miss Brodie tells the girls this story; sitting outside, the girls brush leaves from their hair. Hugh “fell like an autumn leaf,” Miss Brodie says, making the girls cry. When the headmistress, Miss Mackay, approaches, the girls are silent. Later, Miss Brodie commends them for that, saying, “Speech is silver but silence is golden.” The chapter ends with the poignant information that Mary Macgregor is to die at age twenty-three in a hotel fire.

Chapter 2

Mary Macgregor, right after the outbreak of World War II, joins the Wrens. She continues to be clumsy and blamed. When she is deserted quickly by a new boyfriend, she looks back on her days in Miss Brodie’s class as the only time when she was really happy. The poignant description of her death in a 1943 Cumberland hotel fire juxtaposes a moment in class when, as a ten-year-old, she is faulted for having spilled ink.

Sandy Stranger, on her tenth birthday, asks Jenny Gray to tea. Over pineapple and cream they discuss “the happiest days of [their] lives.” Unlike Miss Brodie who has her prime, their parents got married and had sexual intercourse. The girls ponder the fact that the art teacher, Mr. Lloyd, “must have committed sex with his wife” because “he” has had a baby. Delighted to be left alone, the girls review their short story about Hugh Carruthers, Miss Brodie’s fiancé, who was killed near the end of World War I. Sandy gets ink on her blouse and gets to go to the science room and have it removed by the beautiful Miss Lockhart.

Twenty-eight years later, in 1958, when Eunice is thirty-nine, she plans a return to Edinburgh and resolves to put flowers on Miss Brodie’s grave.... » Complete The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Summary