The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie : Perennial Classics Edition

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Summary: Shrewd, witty, and finally compassionate story
Review: As a teacher and department chair, I find myself alternating between Miss Brodie and Miss Mackay in my daily life. The Miss Brodies of the world are fascinating, inspiring creatures--they make us want to learn and to believe in having a mission. Yet, also like Miss Brodie, they can be dangerous, when their style either masks a lack of substance or a very foggy understanding of the implications of the ideologies behind the personalities they embrace. At the same time, while we need Miss Mackays in order to make sure the trains run on time (as it was said of Mussolin, Il Duce, Miss Brodie's own hero), they lack the "spark" (pardon the pun) that make us want to learn--and to teach. How to reconcile the spiritual and the utilitarian in this world--this seems to me to be Spark's theme. Perhaps most intriguing, ultimately, is Sandy herself--the somewhat monstrous amalgam of both Brodie and Mackay. I have been Miss Brodie, in my "prime," yet I also understand the dilemma a Miss Mackay faces--and who, finally, would want to be Miss Mackay, in any case? Perhaps the lesson is to allow, empower our students, our children, to be critical of their education--and thus to learn how to take from each educator the lessons she or he has to offer. The film, by the way, while necessarily making some changes (though giving Teddy Lloyd back his arm seems to me an unfortunate choice), is quite marvelous, with Maggie Smith's performance justly prized, but also featuring fine work from Celia Johnson and Pamela Franklin.

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Summary: Great read
Review: Intersting views provided on education and loyalties, along with some other such ideas dealing with their society.

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Summary: Not what I expected
Review: I initially read this book because I had heard so much about it and how great it was supposed to be. Halfway through, I was sorry. The story didn't seem to have much of a point, and I just didn't appreciate the humor.

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Summary: Teacher who taught her lile
Review: When I saw the play in Ediburgh, 1992, I jst saw the play. Now, as I am teaching at girl's schools in Japan, I know what is happeing to the play. Someties I proceed the lesson like Miss Brodie. Each student has some same characters I have. Each student has different types of characteristic. Some of them are shy, sociable, slow in learning or have talent in somethig. Biss Brodie's lesson is about her life, even though it does not lead to high marks on the test. She is the teacher wo taught her life to the students. gives her spiritual power to her students.

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Summary: Utter and Absolute Perfection!
Review: Whatever is being taught in American schools these days, this book should be added to the list. Muriel Spark has written a classic story that will and has stood the test of time, as the recent British revival of the play has proved. I've read this book half a dozen times and can't wait to open it to the first page again. Brava!

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Summary: just marvelous
Review: The book is crisp and witty in a very British way. And most unsentimental -- which makes the conclusion all the more cutting.

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Summary: A nice read on a rainy day.
Review: An excellent book on adolescent growth, set in in the 1930's. Many of the values espoused in this book are still relevant today

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Summary: A Terrific Read
Review: This is an excellent short book about a domineering spinster teacher, named Jean Brodie, who in the 1930's in Edinburgh, Scotland, gathered six girls into the Brodie Set, looking to make them the creme de le creme.

The best part of this story though is the style Muriel Spark writes with. Juxtaposing time in between paragraphs, letting information and nuance about Jean Brodie, her girls, her loves, opinions, style and difficulties, trickle out lightly before revealing the truth of the matter, Spark is in full control.

There is a psychology to her creation of the Brodie Set, the girl with Insight, the girl with Instinct, the Dumb girl, the girl known for her Anger, the Actress, the Athletic girl, all lead by Miss Jean Brodie, who never fails to remind them all, and herself, that she is "in her prime." And by this, her ideas, passions and dreams are revealed, to and onto the girls, to tragic, shameful and interesting conclusions.

This is a classic book, for many reasons. The style of story telling, a wonderfully rounded lead character, whose strength and focus inspire and shape young minds, and a reflective quality that looks on with wonder at the past, and the actions of those who lived through it.

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Summary: Interesting as long as you have interest in the subject
Review: Miss Jean Brodie is a spinster and a teacher who can teach anything to her students. But she is a peculiar teacher. She doesn't care spending her class times with mathematics, history, English and all other regular subjects. She prefers to explore life, to teach her set of students --the chosen ones-- how to deal with life, love, friends and have good manners. Of course she will have problems with the school administration.

This is a summary of Muriel Spark's most important novel, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in a nutshell. And however the book is really short, it has a wide range of subject and characters. The writer explores not only the life of her heroine but also the existence of a couple of her students. Part of the characters is very human and part is rather archetypical. It would top notch if the author could have transformed all of them in human beings. However it turns out not to be a problem, since the narrative is quite entertaining and an interesting portray of a time.

The best creation is, of course, Miss Jean Brodie. She sounds stereotypical some time, some times a little naïve, but never uninteresting. She has advices for everything: "speech is silver, but silence is golden", a window can be opened more than six inches, it would be too vulgar; and so it goes. While for her girls they are quite important, for the readers they can be rather amusing. It is impossible to one not the wonder weather those advices are for real or some far fetched thoughts from Miss Brodie's mind.

Using the style of anticipation, early in the narrative we learn things that will only happen many years later, like the fact that one girl will betray Miss Brodie, and that another one will become a Sister. This device may put off some readers due to the fact it cuts short the surprise in the narrative.

However much I liked Miss Brodie and her adventures, I've never felt really connected to the book. There was always something missing to make me sink in the narrative and in the lives of the characters. Maybe a lack of emotion --most of it read a little to superficial to me--, or the theme --this may be a novel that have more connection with girls. But, I still recommend "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". It is a fast an interesting read.


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Summary: 'There were legions of her kind'
Review: By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark `feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that `betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.