Muriel Spark was a poet for many years before she became a novelist, and her prose has been praised for its compressed, lyrical style. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie describes a time period and a character, rather than developing an intricate plot. The novel is narrated objectively in the third person omniscient perspective; still, most of the story is told from Sandy’s point of view. She has a vivid imagination and often carries on dialogue, writes letters, or conceives of action sequences while Miss Brodie is teaching, thereby further diluting the narrative trajectory.

Despite the novel’s anticlimactic revelations, Spark keeps her readers interested by anchoring descriptions to specific actions that develop key themes, while withholding information central to those actions. For example, one Saturday afternoon when they are in Senior division, Sandy and Jenny are invited to take tea with Miss Brodie at Lowther’s wealthy estate. The purpose of the episode is to characterize the couple’s relationship during what was for the times a rather torrid love affair. For a reader, the single day becomes the centerpiece in a narrative web that includes all the characters who have reason to betray the teacher, as well as the possible means they might employ to do so. None of the characters is confirmed as the betrayer, and the episode concludes with a simple domestic musing by Miss Brodie. The musing forms a prime example of how each of their commonplace lives will be transfigured by the impending world war, the aftermath of which is not directly addressed in the text.

Early in her career, Spark tended to distance herself from her Scottish heritage. She once wrote, Edinburgh is the place that I, a constitutional exile, am essentially exiled from. . . . It was Edinburgh that bred within me the conditions of exiledom.

Still, Spark uses this elemental locale as the setting for her novel. Additionally, she makes Miss Brodie a quintessential Scot by specifying that she is descended from Deacon William Brodie (1741-1788), a businessman and thief who was hanged on a gallows he himself had designed. Brodie’s antagonist, Sandy Stranger, is part English, and her different heritage is marked by both her clean articulation and her family’s high-toned restrictions on the excursions she may make. The Scottish Miss Brodie may instruct the girls in taste and culture, but she is ultimately too romantic to survive in the modern world, while Sandy’s rational approach proves politically effective, if ruthless.

The Scottish allegory necessarily involves questions of religion with which Spark herself wrestled before converting to Catholicism. Sandy is a “stranger” to both the city of Edinburgh and its Calvinistic doctrines. At one point, she reflects that her teacher’s admiration for the Italians, as well as her passion for beauty, make her a natural candidate for Catholicism. Instead, Miss Brodie denounces the Church as too superstitious and chooses a democratic participation in Scotland’s range of religious traditions, from the Anglican Church to the Zionist. This specturm includes Presbyterianism, heavily influenced by John Calvin’s (1509-1564) theory of predestination. Calvin taught that each individual’s fate in the afterlife is decided by God at birth and that no amount of religious devotion can influence His decision. This fatalistic attitude is the factor that most alienates Sandy from the town in which she lives. The idea that her destiny is predetermined either by God or by Miss Brodie is repugnant to the young student and ultimately forces her to rebel.

In speaking of her own conversion, Spark claims to have been “put off a long time by individual Catholics,” and her characters reflect this general...