The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

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Critical Context

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From the time of its publication, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has been highly praised for its remarkable construction and craftsmanship. Critics have disagreed, however, about the novel’s religious implications. Granville Hicks, in The Saturday Review, noted that Muriel Spark, who, like Sandy Stranger, converted to Catholicism, is a “gloomy Catholic,” like Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, “more concerned with the evil of man than with the goodness of God.” If so, Spark, like O’Connor, is brilliantly satiric and amusing in her gloominess. Moreover, the gloom can be just as easily traced to John Calvin as to the Holy See, for, as Samuel Hynes noted in Commonweal, “the setting of the novel is Edinburgh, and the spirit of Calvin broods over the novel.”

Both Charles Alva Hoyt in 1965 and Harrison in 1976 found a more likely novelist to compare with Spark than the “gloomy” Catholics first noted by reviewers working against journalistic deadlines. Hoyt called Spark a “surrealist Jane Austen,” and Harrison made this parallel even more convincing: “Like Jane Austen,” he wrote, “Muriel Spark is a moral satirist.” Clearly, Spark makes fun of both her protagonist, foolishly obsessed with the notion of being in her “prime” and ridiculously self-centered, and Sandy, her Stranger nemesis, whose vision is squinted through her porcine eyes. Both characters are seriously flawed, and the novelist seems to be laughing at both of them.

No doubt The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of Spark’s most artful efforts, and it probably has done more than any other of her works to spread her reputation to a mass audience. The novel was dramatized by Jay Presson Allen in 1966 and performed at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre and, in the United States, in Boston and then on Broadway. This dramatization then became the basis for the Twentieth Century-Fox film version released in 1969, directed by Ronald Neame and starring the incomparable Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie.

The strong character of Miss Jean Brodie is excellent dramatic material, as is the conflict between the teacher and her star pupil, Sandy. Presson’s dramatization compressed the characters of Mary Macgregor and Joyce Emily Hammond into one, and, more seriously, had Sandy flaunt her betrayal to Brodie to make a tidy, dramatic conclusion, but simplifying motives and stripping the story of much of its subtlety. The film was good enough to win for Maggie Smith an Academy Award as Best Actress in 1969, but it only proved for Stanley Kauffmann, writing in The New Republic, that “the better a novel is, the less successful an adaptation of it is likely to be.”

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