The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

1. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Jesse “J-Balla" Evenson & Jairus "Jarhead" James

2. Biography of the Author Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, Scotland as the daughter of Sarah Maud and Bernard Camberg who was an engineer. She went to James Gillespie’s High School for Girls. Later in life she went to Heriot-Watt College and then taught English for a short amount of time and then worked as a secretary in a department store. She married Sidney Oswald Spak on September 3rd, 1937 and followed him to Zimbabwe, Africa. On July 1938 their son Robin was born but in a few months time they discovered that Sidney was manic depressive. In 1940 Muriel left her family and returned to the U.K. She worked in Intelligence for the remainder of WWII and provided money at regular intervals to support her son.

3. Summary of the Work In her 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark brings to life a charming teacher in a private Edinburgh school during the 1930s. Miss Brodie’s six students, known collectively as “the Brodie set,” move through the grades. Miss Brodie sabotages school curriculum as she grandstands her own passions, both personal and academic. She conspires with her students regarding her status in the school and trouble she has with the headmistress. Miss Brodie is memorable for these students, recalled in their later lives, as repeated flash-forwards reveal. Miss Brodie praises fascism, her very taste for it a sign of her teachings. Intrigued by the appeal of absolute domination, with its apparent order and efficiency, Miss Brodie forgets that each person is a human being with rights. In her ridicule of Mary Macgregor, in her irresponsible direction to Joyce Emily Hammond to go off and fight for Franco, and in her attempt to sexually manipulate Rose Stanley, Miss Brodie sets morality aside and denies the humanity of her students. Mary’s death in a fire in 1943 connects this denial to the greater obscenity occurring at the same time on the Continent in the death camps.

4. Insight Into Themes • Control- Centered around Brodie’s attempts to influence the girls actions and beliefs. She takes the girls in and tries to imbue them with her views on culture and life. • Conformity- Miss Brodie’s admiration for fascism reinforces this and Sandy connects the girls as “the Brodie set” likens the girls to Mussolini’s soldiers. • Friendship – Brodie never expected one of her best students to betray her. In fact, she suspected someone else of a heinous act and it wasn’t really her. This theme is that we must choose our friends wisely and know who they are, because the unexpected can happen.

5. Descriptions of the Main Characters Jean Brodie-Miss Jean Brodie is a lower-level teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the years leading up to World War II, Miss Brodie teaches in a theatrical manner and makes an impression on her students, with whom she plots in sabotaging the academic curriculum. Having lost her fiance Hugh Carruthers, in World War I, Miss Brodie becomes attached to the married art teacher, Mr. Lloyd. Rose Stanley- Rose is a beautiful blonde with instinct but no insight. Rose is “famous for promiscuous activities” and the art teacher asks her to model in his paintings due to her beauty. In every painting though, Rose has the likeness of Brodie who the art teacher loves. Rose and Sandy are the two girls whom Miss Brodie place at becoming the top of the top. Sandy Stranger- Taken as a special confidante, she is repeatedly reminded by Miss Brodie that she has insight but no instinct. She rejects Calvinism and is instead in favor of Roman Catholicism. Mary Macgregor- A slow and dim-witted girl, she is seen as Miss Brodies’s scapegoat. She bears the blame for everything that goes wrong. When she is 23 she dies in a hotel fire.

6. Major Conflicts • Basically there’s a big love triangle going on between three teachers, one of them being the main character, Miss Brodie, and the other two male teachers. And Brodi has 6 10-year old girls she teaches. • She leaves Loyd, the more handsome male teacher for Lowther, the other one, because Loyd is getting married • Then out of nowhere, one of Brodie’s students gets flashed by a man. The po-po investigate. • Her girls move to the senior class and Sandy kisses Loyd... • Brodie asks her girls, including Sandy, who come to visit her since they left, about Loyd • Lowther is like “Forget you” and gets married to the school science teacher instead. • Now Brodie thinks her most beautiful student, Rose, is having an affair with Loyd. She’s 15, really now? • Then again out of nowhere, a student wants to join the teenage-girl clique that Brodie has going on, and basically Brodie tells her, politely, to go fight in the Spanish-Civil War and she listens and gets killed in a train wreck. • Sandy has an affair with Loyd (she’s 17) and then leaves him after a while because he gets boring. Then she tells Brodie’s arch nemesis (aka the science teacher that married Lowther), Mrs. Mackay, to accuse Brodie of fascism and so Brodie gets fired. • Sandy becomes a nun. • Brodie finally realizes Sandy was behind all this...on her deathbed.

7. The Time Period and its Impact • The book’s setting takes place in the 1930’s. After WWII the marrying age fell down a lot, so it makes sense that these girls were having affairs and stuff with men probably twice their age. Also, before this, around the 1920s-30s, dating had started to come about and it became very popular. It makes sense that such a love triangle and affairs existed because it was probably fueled by the brand new concept of dating. • Around the 1960’s (the time the book was actually published), the marrying age went back up and dating became less constant, or at least ritualized. Maybe the author had written a book with a setting taking place in the 30’s because she feels as if that time was more important than the current one, or was trying to stress the importance of the consequences of the rapid, wild dating scenes that had taken place like they did in the book, and how the current time was much better than that time.

8. Other Works • Tribute to Wordsworth (edited with Derek Stanford) (1950) • Child of Light (a study of Mary Shelley) (1951) • The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952) • Selected Poems of Emily Brontë (1952) • John Masefield (biography) (1953) • Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (with Derek Stanford) (1953) • My Best Mary (a selection of letters of Mary Shelley, edited with Derek Stanford) (1953) • The Brontë letters (1954) • Letters of John Henry Newman (edited with Derek Stanford) (1957) • The Go-away Bird (short stories) (1958) • Voices at Play (short stories and plays) (1961) • Doctors of Philosophy (play) (1963) • Collected Poems I (1967) • Collected Stories I (1967) • The Very Fine Clock (children's book, illustrations by Edward Gorey)(1968) • Bang-bang You're Dead (short stories) (1982) • Mary Shelley (complete revision of Child of Light) (1987) • Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems (1982) • Curriculum Vitae (autobiography) (1992) • Complete Short Stories (2001) • All the Poems (2004)