The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie…book review
prime times of life…
Book review:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
New York: Harper Perennial, 1961, 1994
187 pages
Miss Jean Brodie, an exceedingly unconventional teacher, described every part of her life and her commitments and her outlook as being “in my prime,” but it is a hallmark of Muriel Spark’s magnificent talent in assembling the best words that it is left to the reader to completely imagine what “prime” may mean.
The defining value of the novel is the unceasing willingness and undaunted desire of Brodie’s carefully chosen students—the girls in the “Brodie set”—to try to figure out what “prime” means and to try to understand the effects their teacher is having on them.
The pages are filled with interactions and misunderstandings and hormonal energies. Miss Brodie and the other grownups dramatically pursue their teaching roles, but the girls largely find their own ways to learn things and work at growing up while doing so.
The book ends but the story doesn’t end. Henry Adams said a teacher can never tell “where (her) influence stops.” The ultimately humiliated Miss Brodie dies, but her prime has no boundaries and her students make their own lives.
p.s. the acclaimed movie with the same name and Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie is first class entertainment, but it mostly ignores Muriel Spark’s grimly realistic portrayal of the life forces that animate the “Brodie set.”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
click here
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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