Monday, March 23, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 79 / The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 79

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

(1960)

Short and bittersweet, Muriel Spark’s tale of the downfall of a Scottish schoolmistress is a masterpiece of narrative fiction

Robert McCrum
Monday 23 March 2015 05.45 GMT

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is probably the shortest novel on this list, a sublime miracle of wit and brevity, and a Scots classic that’s a masterclass in narrative construction and the art of “less is more”. The action centres on the romantic, fascinating, comic and ultimately tragic schoolmistress Jean Brodie who will, in the most archetypal sense, suffer for the sin of hubris, her excessive self-confidence. At first, her ideas about beauty and goodness, her mysterious glamour and charm will dazzle and seduce her girls – “the crème de la crème” – at the Marcia Blaine School, but in the end the same gifts will cause her downfall. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” she boasts, “and she is mine for life.” Eventually that prediction will be fulfilled in the saddest way imaginable.

It is, as Miss Brodie says, “nineteen-thirty-six. The age of chivalry is dead.” The novel’s theme, deftly laid out in a narrative that flashes backwards and forwards, to and from the 1930s, is the education of six wonderfully distinctive, heartless and romantic 10-year-old girls (Monica, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, and Eunice) and the covert classroom drama that leads to Miss Brodie’s “betrayal”, her peremptory dismissal from Marcia Blaine by her great enemy, the headmistress, Miss Mackay. That, of course, has nothing to do with school, and everything to do with sex, and the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, with whom Miss Brodie (defiantly in her “prime”) is hopelessly in love.

It had been Miss Brodie’s plan to control and manipulate the lives of “her girls”. But finally, it is Sandy who, before she becomes Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, exacts the decisive revenge that will doom her teacher to a bitter and solitary spinsterhood. Miss Brodie will never get over it, and die quite soon. “‘Whatever possessed you?’ said Miss Brodie in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke.”

My paperback edition runs to just 128 pages. The elfin spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson (No 24 in this series) hovers over every line, and Muriel Spark nods to this influence by having some of the girls read Kidnapped.

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The trailer for the film adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

A note on the text

Muriel Spark occupies a special place in the Observer’s literary history. As a young woman, she had made her way as a poet, literary editor and literary biographer in postwar London. But it was as a short-story writer that she first came to prominence at the very end of 1951, when she won the Observer short story competition for her surreal and, in places, richly poetic “The Seraph and the Zambesi”. Her novels followed soon after; by the late 1950s, she was fully established as a writer to watch.

Spark’s method of composition became quite famous. She composed her fiction in a copperplate hand, usually a single draft with very few corrections, in spiral-bound school notebooks from the Edinburgh stationer and bookseller James Thin. It was in such a volume that she began to write about a middle-aged schoolteacher, drawn from her own school memories.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is so short that it was first published, in its entirety, in the New Yorker, and then reissued in volume form by Macmillan in the UK in 1961. The character of Miss Jean Brodie became Spark’s “milch cow”, and brought her international fame, especially after the novel was made into a film starring Maggie Smith, who won an Academy (best actress) award for her performance.

Muriel Spark: sublime wit and brevity.
Photograph: Frank Monaco/Rex Features

In real life, the character of Miss Brodie was based in part on Christina Kay, a teacher of Spark’s for two years at her Edinburgh school, James Gillespie’s School for Girls. the author would later write of her thus: “What filled our minds with wonder and made Christina Kay so memorable was the personal drama and poetry within which everything in her classroom happened.” Miss Kay was the basis for the good parts of Brodie’s character, but also some of the more bizarre. For example, Miss Kay did hang posters of Renaissance paintings on the wall, and also of Mussolini marching with Italian fascists.

Another Scottish writer, Candia McWilliam, identified the novel’s lasting appeal when she wrote that it is “sublimely funny, and also very short, with much to say about sex”. She adds that it is “technically beyond praise. The pressure it exerts upon the mind is controlled by a guiding spirit that reveals to us the moral universe while affording the refreshment of laughter and revelation.” What better definition of a classic?