the prime of miss jean brodie book review

But Spark shows us this little glinting corner of life – the six girls of Miss Brodie’s set, at this moment of their unconventional education, before their innocence is extinguished, and in the case of poor Mary Macgregor, her life too.Īnd yet what exactly does Miss Brodie, in her prime, achieve with her girls? And, of course we know that many more will die in the Second World War, which isn’t far off. Chivalry is dead, and so are all the young men killed by the First World War, including Miss Brodie’s fiancé.

The year is 1936 Miss Brodie tells us: ‘The age of chivalry is dead’. These were the days that Mary Macgregor, on looking back, found to be the happiest days of her life.

And if you can’t take an interest in what I am saying, please try to look as if you do.’ I’ve never come across such a clumsy girl. ‘Who has spilled ink on the floor – was it you, Mary?’ But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled and died. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her.

She ran one way then, turning, the other way and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. Mary’s innocent vagueness and clumsiness, we soon learn, will one day get her killed in a hotel fire:īack and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. The narrative is extremely sophisticated, moving about in time (but she does this easily, not joltingly) so that we get little flashes of what will happen to the girls when they grow up. This time round there seems to be a horrible poignancy to Spark’s portrayal of the schoolgirls. Reading it again, in my thirties, it is a completely different book, and even better than I remembered. I remember enjoying the book, feeling a kindred spirit with the six schoolgirls of Miss Brodie’s ‘set’, all madly obsessed with finding out about sex, and under the spell of their teacher, Jean Brodie, who is forever telling them that she is in her prime. I have an extremely clear memory of reading this book, one school summer holiday, sitting on a train and looking out of the window as we passed through Dawlish in Devon, where the train tracks seem almost to run over the sea itself.

The prime of miss jean brodie book review