The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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Skilful and sometimes witty prose - Rated
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live - Rated
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind' - Rated
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.

fab wee play! - Rated
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Brilliant character sketch that seems too short - Rated
TPOMJB is an exercise on how opinions and outlooks can change over time with a little help from a catalyst- in this case Jean Brodie who grooms her girls to think the way she does. As a novella TPOMJB is perfect as a character piece and a study on change- Brodie is unique both monstrous and believable in equal measures. Her admiration of Mussolini’s fascists shows the darker element of her personality and her demands that her “set” believe what she accept as truth show her domineering side which is instantly recognisable to most as we have all had teachers that have some similarity to Jean Brodie.
Where TPOMJB disappoints is in the plot of Brodie’s “downfall” by one of her girls, which feels unlikely and superfluous in such a taut novel. The characters of Brodie’s “set” also seem undeveloped, perhaps the class should have been scaled down to make each girl recognisable or more emphasis put on Brodie. It seems a shame we have to say goodbye to this browbeating teacher after less than two hundred pages when she is such an original if somewhat unpleasant character.
TPOMJB is a short, snappy novella with many a hidden meaning on the influence of people on others and the vulnerability of us all.