Classic Book Review: 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' by Muriel Spark

“‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ is technically beyond praise...’” Candia McWilliam

So says the foreword of the latest Penguin edition of Muriel Spark’s ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, regarded as a modern British classic and one of the titles on the World Book Night 2011 reading list.

Spark's novel about a pretentious and incredibly self-confident Scottish school mistress and her elite group of protégées at the fictional Marcia Blaine School is so concise it straddles the novella borderline. Miss Brodie, in her self-appointed prime grooms her girls for life and love, occasionally using them as unwitting pawns in her own devious romantic games.  Brevity is one of the novel’s assets, as is its slightly fragmented, non-linear narrative; the future constantly interrupting the past and vice versa.  This is both a literary and visual device we’ve come to take for granted now.  That Spark was using it 50 odd years ago when ‘The Prime...’ was first published suggests she was quite ahead of her time.  Yet for all it has to recommend it, it is not the transcendent, life-changing read Candia McWilliam and other ‘...Miss Jean Brodie’ adherents would have me believe.

Initially Brodie’s extensive travels and devotion to the arts makes her quite the urbane maverick; ostracised, reviled and covertly admired by her colleagues in equal measure.  You might be inclined to overlook her eccentricity and overblown self-belief.  Yet as she connives to use individuals at her whim, not to mention her inexplicably cruel disposition towards poor hapless Mary MacGregor –the group’s resident scapegoat- Brodie’s hypocrisy and delusions of grandeur no longer seem so charming.

This is the main problem I have with ‘The Prime...’ Miss Brodie is just not likeable or relatable enough a character to justify her being venerated as a great literary masterpiece.  Likeability is not especially important if you can at least have some understanding of the motivation for a character’s behaviour.  ‘Notes on a Scandal’ author Zoe Heller for instance has a knack for creating harridans with whom you can occasionally empathise.  Spark does not go into enough detail about Miss Jean’s background to gain proper insight or to warrant compassion for her.  When we learn of Brodie’s eventual ‘betrayal’ by one of her girls, leading to her finally being ousted by her faculty foes, I felt no sympathy; merely vindication for those whom she’d wronged. 

Indeed Brodie is a strong female lead character.  Yet she also displays the wily and manipulative characteristics too often attributed to women seemingly in control; the root of Jezebel.  If we can’t get our way using a direct approach, we can always resort to our sexuality and female cunning to achieve the desired outcome.  It’s not the best representation of feminine strength in literature or otherwise but neither, thankfully, is it the only kind.

I suppose Brodie is meant to be one of those anti-heroes/heroines we come to begrudgingly adore in the way some seem to have a subversive affection for Mersault in Camus’ ‘L’étranger’ or Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s bafflingly overrated ‘Catcher In The Rye’.  Yet they are devoid of the genuine pathos and roguish charm of a Jay Gatsby, say.  Not so much loveable rogues as just plain old rogues.