The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

I really don't know Muriel Spark at all and most of my associations here are with Oscars excitement in the '60s for a movie I never saw. If anything, I had this filed in my mind with the execrable My Fair Lady, a film based on a Bernard Shaw play. But actually this short, bristly novel is pretty good, dense and swift-moving. Miss Jean Brodie is an unconventional teacher at a girls' school. She claims she is in her prime, sophisticated, charming, and civilized as she ages from her 30s into her 40s, a single woman. The narrative is soon unmoored in time, with flashbacks, flash-forwards, and all manner of flash-arounds, plus there are some things to figure out. Miss Brodie cultivates a group of six girls passing into high school age. They are the "Brodie set"—her favorites. Each has a name and one or two distinguishing characteristics, which is not to understate how vivid each one will become. They are an odd group. The strangest may be Mary Macgregor, who is not very bright and ultimately dies in a hotel fire when she is 23. The most detailed (she might secretly be the author) is Sandy Stranger, who has small eyes, rejects Calvinism, and becomes a nun later. It all takes place, or mostly, in Edinburgh in the 1930s. One of Miss Brodie's most unsettling traits is her confident embrace of fascism. In fact, in a way that's what leads to her downfall, as in the arc of this story she is betrayed and loses her career. The people out to bring her down are more worried about her sexual adventuring, which of course is quite mild. She has a crush on one teacher, and a dalliance with another, which ends when he marries someone else. Much is made of these incidents—by the girls, by school authorities, and by Miss Brodie herself, whose real flaw is merely a dose of narcissism and an inclination to talk too much about her world view and personal life. Of course, they're part of the reason the six girls adore her too. I can see myself a little in them, remembering a notably young and glamorous woman who was my sixth-grade teacher. She had no fascist sympathies or love affairs with other teachers I ever heard about, however, though she did drive a VW bug. Honestly, one of the things I like most about this novel is how much Miss Brodie can make my skin crawl. I've met this self-obsessed type elsewhere and I don't like them, even though I recognize the charismatic charms, and even wish there were a way I could meet her for coffee sometime. She's a corker and so is this novel.

In case it's not at the library.