The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) has long been recognized as a brilliantly woven novel, complex in its narrative technique and themes. One of the most significant themes in the novel is that of the double life led by Jean Brodie and her set. The theme of the double life is particularly illuminated by two oddly assorted motifs, the story of an Edinburgh burglar, William Brodie, and an Italian Renaissance painting, Botticelli's Primavera. (p. 418)

The dreariness of [the life of Miss Brodie and her set] rises from the particular conditions of the school, of the thirties, of Philistinism in society, but the great enemy is simply boredom, and one escapes that by leading an exciting though dangerous double life.

The most promising girl of the Brodie set, Sandy, discovers fairly early how to lead a double life in order to escape from the tedium of ordinary life…. Her double life, at first merely daydreaming, but later an actual living out of a second role, is nearly always inspired, in one way or another, by the imagination of Jean Brodie. (pp. 418-19)

Sandy's ultimate betrayal of Miss Brodie is a betrayal of the life of the imagination that Jean Brodie has taught her how to live. (p. 420)

Jean Brodie's imagination is of a rather old-fashioned kind. She remains a late Victorian romantic, unlike the other Edinburgh spinsters who … are curious, argumentative, above all, open to new ideas…. Her admiration for her supposed ancestor Willie Brodie is a case in point…. What is in the Brodie blood is intolerance of the boredom of life among the respectable folk and a taste for adventure; [Willie] Brodie leads a double life as a man of business and an adventurous burglar…. (pp. 420-21)

Jean Brodie's romantic veneration of her outlaw ancestor is like that of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was fascinated in his youth by the duplicity of the Edinburgh cabinetmaker and burglar, and after attempting two plays on the man, wrote with W. E. Henley a play called "Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life." Although Stevenson allows Brodie only one mistress, her name is Jean. Exactly how Jean Brodie was descended from Willie Brodie she is not made to say, and if, like Sandy, we look about for the facts of the case, we find no mention of Brodie's wife. In "The Double Life," however, the mistress is with child. Jean Brodie may be making Willie's story fit her own in giving him two mistresses and five children, corresponding to her two lovers and the six girls in the Brodie set (five, perhaps, since Mary McGregor never really counts). She omits, however, a significant detail, not anticipating its application: Brodie, in real life and in the play, was betrayed by a member of his own gang.

Although with the music master Jean Brodie leads the life of the redoubtable Willie Brodie, with the art master she leads another kind of double life, still more subtly devious. Although she genuinely loves the art master, and he returns the love, she renounces him for some reason, a mystery never entirely explained. Her renunciation makes the great love of her prime one that can be lived only in the imagination. (pp. 421-22)

After Jean has renounced the art master, the Brodie set, now students in his art class, become a link between the two…. When she learns that Teddy Lloyd is painting a portrait of Rose, her imagination rises to new flights, and she invents the denouement in the story of her own great love: Rose is to take Jean Brodie's place and to become the mistress of the art master…. This story of Rose, this modern Roman de la Rose, is not finished as Jean Brodie imagines it…. Sandy, who has been appointed the spy to bring back the story to Jean Brodie, chooses to take the role of the heroine, as she has taken so many others in the fictions of others' devising: Jean Brodie's love story comes finally to an end she did not imagine.

As an ironic comment on this love story, Muriel Spark employs allusions to the Renaissance painting, Botticelli's Primavera, suggesting both obvious antitheses and subtle parallels. The most obvious ironies have to do with the double meanings of "prime."… Miss Brodie herself suggests in one of her curious lessons that there are ambiguities in the word. "One's prime is the moment one is born for," she says; it is "elusive," however, and "may come at any time of life."… "Prime," in another sense, is spring, related to the Italian Primavera, as Miss Brodie knows…. But a number of images associate Miss Brodie in her prime not with spring but with autumn. (pp. 423-24)

That Jean Brodie's "prime" begins in autumn, and in the late years of her life, may indicate her confusion of seasons and may be a sign of the disorder that later dismays Sandy. On the other hand, it may be a triumph of her imagination over time and death.

The Primavera points to such ambiguous interpretations. (p. 426)

In Sandy's imagination, as Miss Spark suggests, Jean Brodie is like a goddess, although she never says just which one…. [She] is most of all like Venus, goddess of love, dispensing the fruits of her prime: life-giving joy, sex, love. (p. 427)

When Miss Brodie is well into the great love of her prime, she plans the lives of the girls with the authority of a goddess…. But although she has some of Venus's power to renew life, she has not the goddess's despotic power…. Perhaps she gives up her power when she renounces the great love of her life.

Why she renounces this love remains a mystery. (pp. 428-29)

Nonetheless, the story of her renunciation inspires Sandy, who, since she is herself without creative imagination, can only spy on Jean Brodie and finally take Rose's place as the heroine of the love story. Even when later she takes another role and betrays Jean Brodie, she becomes the heroine of another Brodie story, the plot against her…. Sandy reacts against this Scottish and sometimes Calvinist Venus (who takes courses in comparative religion) by turning to a higher authority in Rome, by becoming a nun. Yet even Sandy does not deny the influence of a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, for like Jenny, she has a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things, suggested by the title of her treatise on the nature of moral perception, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace." Whatever the explanation of that moral perception, she has, one is sure, been led to it through her awakening to the nature of aesthetic perception. (pp. 429-30)

Jean Brodie, through her double lives, has shown Sandy how to escape the everyday world, the dreariness of the school, of the thirties, of life itself…. Jean Brodie has also shown the girls, however, that the aesthetic transformation is not permanent, but is fleeting, like the beauty of Jean Brodie that comes and goes, and for this reason, the girls, and most of all Sandy, ultimately find refuge in the permanent institutions of society, no longer leading dangerous lives, mixing imagination and reality. (pp. 430-31)