The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

This slim novel tells of Miss Jean Brodie, who, in the prime of her life, takes six girls under her wing at the Marcia Blaine School, where they each will become famous for something and are (except for Mary), the crème de la crème. Miss Brodie is an unconventional teacher, to say the least, and the headmistress is always trying to bring her down. But what brings her down in the end is unexpected. An interesting character study. I can't say that I was enamored of this book as I have been by others from Spark, but I was glad I read it. ( )

VERY GOOD
A teacher her her "girls" & teaches them thru her experiences & values rather than the curriculum. At some point she not only teaches them but begins to "manipulate
them. She "label" them & guides them as puppets. What is being in one's "PRIME" mean? What is a good Eucator? "CREME D LA CREME" ( )

Hilarious. Good company for Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, although more modern. I'll seek out the movie adaptation (Maggie Smith in 1969 title role) now. ( )

Spark at her Sparkiest, taking what should by rights be a wistfully comic look back at her Edinburgh schooldays and turning it into a dark, difficult, morally complex - but hilariously funny - novel about sex and politics, betrayal and loyalty, romanticism and hard reality, eccentricity and conventionality, Catholicism and Calvinism, childhood's end, and the confusing historical moment of the 1930s. And all crammed into not much more than 100 pages of high-energy prose, with her classic mid-sentence ironic pauses destabilising the most harmless phrases and turning them into enough gunpowder to blow up this school.

It's a great book to re-read - you can do it in a couple of hours, and you will find something quite different in it from last time you read it. This time I found myself focussing on the way the story is tied into the historical moment, Miss Brodie's status as one of the many young women of her generation left a spinster because their men had been killed in the great War, and the way that anomalous position provided a kind of licence for them to behave in ways that would otherwise have been outside the pattern for their generation and class. That generation of women were still around when I was a child, and they were all quite special in their different ways, although of course I didn't think of it that way at the time... ( )

"Education means a leading out, from the Latin e out, and duco, I lead. Instruction is a putting in."

This is the guiding principle of Miss Jean Brodie in the Blaine School for Girls. Make no mistake; Miss Brodie views herself as an educator, not an instructor. But her execution is quite unorthodox. She gathers her "Brodie set" of six girls and proceeds to educate them while she is "in her prime" and following her own unique path in the world.

Though my career has been in the IT area, teaching is something I've done a lot of - to all age groups, small children to adults - and that I really like doing.

So what do I think of Miss Brodie? I'm a little in awe, but a little incredulous. She's scandalous, courageous and praiseworthy all in one. ( )