Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about a woman called Jean Brodie who is a teacher at the Marcia Blaine girls' school in Edinburgh, Scotland. Jean Brodie is a powerful yet manipulative woman who is admired by her students; in the book, Blaine describes one of Miss Brodie's 'sets' of teenage students, from the age of 12 until the age of 18. We also learn of Jean Brodie's unhappy love affairs. Miss Brodie's proclivities do not go unnoticed and she is not very popular with all members of staff, many of whom think that she might be better off at a different, more 'progressive' school. Miss Brodie, however, insists that she is in the 'prime' of her life—she refuses to ever admit defeat and insists, contrary to objective facts, that her life is at its zenith. She also uses the notion of her 'prime' to explain away all kinds of misconduct.

Miss Brodie believes she is in her prime as she enters her 40s in the 1930s. She is a middle-aged spinster who lost her love, as so many women did, on the battlefield during World War I. As a teacher, the middle-aged Miss Brodie feels she is at the point to offer strong leadership to the chosen few: the girls she gathers around her and constantly calls "the creme de la creme" as she molds them in her own image. Her "prime" symbolizes her fascism, her desire for power and control over her students, and her willingness to manipulate them. She admires Mussolini and then, after a visit to Germany, Hitler's Nazi state. Like these leaders, she wants not just to educate her "Brodie set," but to indoctrinate them entirely into her way of thinking.