A devastating portrait of a narcissistic Edinburgh school mistress and the coterie of impressionable girls that she takes under her wing, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie cloaks a deliciously scathing attack on the abuse of power in exquisitely crafted and economical prose.
Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie includes an introduction by Candia McWilliam in Penguin Modern Classics.
Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - 'the creme de la creme' - who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a privileged world of adult games that they will never forget. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted into a successful stage play, and later a film directed by Ronald Neame and starring Maggie Smith.
Muriel Spark (1918 - 2006) wrote poetry, stories, and biographies as well as a remarkable series of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) which received the James Tait Black Prize, and The Public Image (1968) and Loitering with Intent (1981), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Spark was awarded the T.S. Eliot Award for poetry in 1992, and the David Cohen Prize for literature in 1997.
If you enjoyed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, you might like Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141181424
Number of pages: 144
Weight: 112 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 8 mm
As an Edinburgh born man, this book sums up for me a very happy childhood in that city of spires and aquatint. It is an Edinburgh which has all but gone but aspects of it survived in the 50's when I was still in... More
I was surprised, reading Miss Brodie thirty years on, to find that several of the expressions I use as if I had thought them up on the spur of the moment are are based loosly on memories of this book. Brilliant. Not a... More
Undoubtedly the theme is religion. Bitter, self-involved and delusional, Miss Brodie tries to control her students as a way to vent out her frustrations over her lost youth.
An interesting prolepsis writing style, but...
More
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?