The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

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Criticism

Auerbach, Nina. "A World at War: One Big Miss Brodie." In Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, pp. 159-91. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Analyzes "the Brodie set" as a community of women, arguing that "the very seclusion of Spark's communities of women assures us that they are not pastoral alternatives to a world at war but symbols of it."

Hicks, Granville. "Treachery and the Teacher." Saturday Review, New York, XLV, No. 3 (20 January 1962): 18.

Favorably reviews The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, concluding that the novel "is admirably written, beautifully constructed, extremely amusing, and deeply serious."

Holloway, John. "Narrative Structure and Text Structure: Isherwood's A Meeting by the River and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." In Narrative and Structure: Exploratory Essays, pp. 74-99. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Theoretical essay on how sets of events in a narrative are interrelated.

Kemp, Peter. "Times Past." In Muriel Spark, pp. 71-112. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975.

Discusses The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, and The Mandelbaum Gate, as constituting a "self-contained and tightly knit … unit." Kemp argues that central to all three novels is "the idea of group-pressure, chauvinistic membership of some community and what this can entail."

Keyser, Barbara. "The Transfiguration of Edinburgh in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Studies in Scottish Literature XII, No. 3 (January 1973): 181-89.

Examines religion and betrayal in Spark's novel and argues that "the Edinburgh of Jean Brodie is no commonplace city … but a city transfigured by Spark's imagination into a richly symbolic correlative for the major themes of her fiction."

Lodge, David. "The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Critical Quarterly 12, No. 3 (1970): 235-57.

Discusses religion, education, and narrative method in Spark's novel.

Paul, Anthony. "Muriel Spark and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Dutch Quarterly Review 7, No. 3 (1977): 170-83.

Discusses style, theme, and technique in Spark's novel and praises her economic use of detail.

Ray, Philip E. "Jean Brodie and Edinburgh: Personality and Place in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Studies in Scottish Literature XIII (1978): 24-31.

Argues that Spark's novel is "at its deepest level, 'about Edinburgh'" and that the title character personifies religious and theological attitudes common to the city's citizens.

Walker, Dorothea. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." In Muriel Spark, pp. 38-50. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Presents an overview of the novel, noting its depiction of the student-teacher relationship and God-like manipulation. Walker concludes that "on a very real level, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in its plot and counterplot, depicts the anatomy of a betrayal."

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