The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by Muriel Spark

  Miss Brodie was not to know that this would be, and meantime Rose was inescapably famous for sex and was much sought after by sixth-form schoolboys and first-year university students. And Miss Brodie said to Sandy: “From what you tell me I should think that Rose and Teddy Lloyd will soon be lovers.” All at once Sandy realised that this was not all theory and a kind of Brodie game, in the way that so much of life was unreal talk and game-planning, like the prospects of a war and other theories that people were putting about in the air like pigeons, and one said, “Yes, of course, it’s inevitable.” But this was not theory, Miss Brodie meant it. Sandy looked at her, and perceived that the woman was obsessed by the need for Rose to sleep with the man she herself was in love with; there was nothing new in the idea, it was the reality that was new. She thought of Miss Brodie eight years ago sitting under the elm tree telling her first simple love story and wondered to what extent it was Miss Brodie who had developed complications throughout the years, and to what extent it was her own conception of Miss Brodie that had changed.

  During the year past Sandy had continued seeing the Lloyds. She went shopping with Deirdre Lloyd and got herself a folkweave skirt like Deirdre’s. She listened to their conversation, at the same time calculating their souls by signs and symbols, as was the habit in those days of young persons who had read books of psychology when listening to older persons who had not. Sometimes, on days when Rose was required to pose naked, Sandy sat with the painter and his model in the studio, silently watching the strange mutations of the flesh on the canvas as they represented an anonymous nude figure, and at the same time resembled Rose, and more than this, resembled Miss Brodie. Sandy had become highly interested in the painter’s mind, so involved with Miss Brodie as it was, and not accounting her ridiculous.

  “From what you tell me I should think that Rose and Teddy Lloyd will soon be lovers.” Sandy realised that Miss Brodie meant it. She had told Miss Brodie how peculiarly all his portraits reflected her. She had said so again and again, for Miss Brodie loved to hear it. She had said that Teddy Lloyd, wanted to give up teaching and was preparing an exhibition, and was encouraged in this course by art critics and discouraged by the thought of his large family.

  “I am his Muse,” said Miss Brodie. “But I have renounced his love in order to dedicate my prime to the young girls in my care. I am his Muse but Rose shall take my place.”

  She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end. And Sandy thought, too, the woman is an unconscious Lesbian. And many theories from the books of psychology categorised Miss Brodie, but failed to obliterate her image from the canvases of one-armed Teddy Lloyd.

  When she was a nun, sooner or later one and the other of the Brodie set came to visit Sandy, because it was something to do, and she had written her book of psychology, and everyone likes to visit a nun, it provides a spiritual sensation, a catharsis to go home with, especially if the nun clutches the bars of the grille. Rose came, now long since married to a successful business man who varied in his line of business from canned goods to merchant banking. They fell to talking about Miss Brodie.

  “She talked a lot about dedication,” said Rose, “but she didn’t mean your sort of dedication. But don’t you think she was dedicated to her girls in a way?”

  “Oh yes, I think she was,” said Sandy.

  “Why did she get the push?” said Rose. “Was it sex?”

  “No, politics.”

  “I didn’t know she bothered about politics.”

  “It was only a side line,” Sandy said, “but it served as an excuse.”

  Monica Douglas came to visit Sandy because there was a crisis in her life. She had married a scientist and in one of her fits of anger had thrown a live coal at his sister. Whereupon the scientist demanded a separation, once and for all.

  “I’m not much good at that sort of problem,” said Sandy. But Monica had not thought she would be able to help much, for she knew Sandy of old, and persons known of old can never be of much help. So they fell to talking of Miss Brodie.

  “Did she ever get Rose to sleep with Teddy Lloyd?” said Monica.

  “No,” said Sandy.

  “Was she in love with Teddy Lloyd herself?”

  “Yes,” said Sandy, “and he was in love with her.”

  “Then it was a real renunciation in a way,” said Monica.

  “Yes, it was,” said Sandy. “After all, she was a woman in her prime.”

  “You used to think her talk about renunciation was a joke,” said Monica.

  “So did you,” said Sandy.

  In the summer of nineteen-thirty-eight, after the last of the Brodie set had left Blaine, Miss Brodie went to Germany and Austria, while Sandy read psychology and went to the Lloyds’ to sit for her own portrait. Rose came and kept them company occasionally.

  When Deirdre Lloyd took the children into the country Teddy had to stay on in Edinburgh because he was giving a summer course at the art school. Sandy continued to sit for her portrait twice a week, and sometimes Rose came and sometimes not.

  One day when they were alone, Sandy told Teddy Lloyd that all his portraits, even that of the littlest Lloyd baby, were now turning out to be likenesses of Miss Brodie, and she gave him her insolent blackmailing stare. He kissed her as he had done three years before when she was fifteen, and for the best part of five weeks of the summer they had a love affair in the empty house, only sometimes answering the door to Rose, but at other times letting the bell scream on.

  During that time he painted a little, and she said: “You are still making me look like Jean Brodie.” So he started a new canvas, but it was the same again.

  She said: “Why are you obsessed with that woman? Can’t you see she’s ridiculous?”

  He said, yes, he could see Jean Brodie was ridiculous. He said, would she kindly stop analysing his mind, it was unnatural in a girl of eighteen.

  Miss Brodie telephoned for Sandy to come to see her early in September. She had returned from Germany and Austria which were now magnificently organised. After the war Miss Brodie admitted to Sandy, as they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel, “Hider was rather naughty,” but at this time she was full of her travels and quite sure the new regime would save the world. Sandy was bored, it did not seem necessary that the world should be saved, only that the poor people in the streets and slums of Edinburgh should be relieved. Miss Brodie said there would be no war. Sandy never had thought so, anyway. Miss Brodie came to the point: “Rose tells me you have become his lover.”

  “Yes, does it matter which one of us it is?”

  “Whatever possessed you?” said Miss Brodie in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke.

  “He interests me,” said Sandy.

  “Interests you, forsooth,” said Miss Brodie. “A girl with a mind, a girl with insight. He is a Roman Catholic and I don’t see how you can have to do with a man who can’t think for himself. Rose was suitable. Rose has instinct but no insight.”

  Teddy Lloyd continued reproducing Jean Brodie in his paintings. “You have instinct,” Sandy told him, “but no insight, or you would see that the woman isn’t to be taken seriously.”

  “I know she isn’t,” he said. “You are too analytical and irritable for your age.”

  The family had returned and their meetings were dangerous and exciting. The more she discovered him to be still in love with Jean Brodie, the more she was curious about the mind that loved the woman. By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time.

  But that autumn, while she was still probing the mind that invented Miss Brodie on canvas after canvas, Sandy met Miss Brodie sev
eral times. She was at first merely resigned to Sandy’s liaison with the art master. Presently she was exultant, and presently again enquired for details, which she did not get.

  “His portraits still resemble me?” said Miss Brodie.

  “Yes, very much,” said Sandy.

  “Then all is well,” said Miss Brodie. “And after all, Sandy,” she said, “you are destined to be the great lover, although I would not have thought it. Truth is stranger than fiction. I wanted Rose for him, I admit, and sometimes I regretted urging young Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco, she would have done admirably for him, a girl of instinct, a—”

  “Did she go to fight for Franco?” said Sandy.

  “That was the intention. I made her see sense. However, she didn’t have the chance to fight at all, poor girl.”

  When Sandy returned, as was expected of her, to see Miss Mackay that autumn, the headmistress said to this rather difficult old girl with the abnormally small eyes, “You’ll have been seeing something of Miss Brodie, I hope. You aren’t forgetting your old friends, I hope.”

  “I’ve seen her once or twice,” said Sandy.

  “I’m afraid she put ideas into your young heads,” said Miss Mackay with a knowing twinkle, which meant that now Sandy had left school it would be all right to talk openly about Miss Brodie’s goings-on.

  “Yes, lots of ideas,” Sandy said.

  “I wish I knew what some of them were,” said Miss Mackay, slumping a little and genuinely worried. “Because it is still going on, I mean class after class, and now she has formed a new set, and they are so out of key with the rest of the school, Miss Brodie’s set. They are precocious. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Sandy. “But you won’t be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?”

  Miss Mackay turned her chair so that it was nearly square with Sandy’s. This was business.

  “My dear,” she said, “what do you mean? I didn’t know she was attracted by politics.”

  “Neither she is,” said Sandy, “except as a side interest. She’s a born Fascist, have you thought of that?”

  “I shall question her pupils on those lines and see what emerges, if that is what you advise, Sandy. I had no idea you felt so seriously about the state of world affairs, Sandy, and I’m more than delighted—”

  “I’m not really interested in world affairs,” said Sandy, “only in putting a stop to Miss Brodie.”

  It was clear the headmistress thought this rather unpleasant of Sandy. But she did not fail to say to Miss Brodie, when the time came, “It was one of your own girls who gave me the tip, one of your set, Miss Brodie.”

  Sandy was to leave Edinburgh at the end of the year and when she said goodbye to the Lloyds she looked round the studio at the canvases on which she had failed to put a stop to Miss Brodie. She congratulated Teddy Lloyd on the economy of his method. He congratulated her on the economy of hers, and Deirdre looked to see whatever did he mean? Sandy thought, if he knew about my stopping of Miss Brodie, he would think me more economical still. She was more fuming, now, with Christian morals, than John Knox.

  Miss Brodie was forced to retire at the end of the summer term of nineteen-thirty-nine, on the grounds that she had been teaching Fascism. Sandy, when she heard of it, thought of the marching troops of black shirts in the pictures on the wall. By now she had entered the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.

  “Of course,” said Miss Brodie when she wrote to tell Sandy the news of her retirement, “this political question was only an excuse. They tried to prove personal immorality against me on many occasions and failed. My girls were always reticent on these matters. It was my educational policy they were up against which had reached its perfection in my prime. I was dedicated to my girls, as you know. But they used this political excuse as a weapon. What hurts and amazes me most of all is the fact, if Miss Mackay is to be believed, that it was one of my own set who betrayed me and put the enquiry in motion.

  “You will be astonished. I can write to you of this, because you of all my set are exempt from suspicion, you had no reason to betray me. I think first of Mary Macgregor. Perhaps Mary had nursed a grievance, in her stupidity of mind, against me— she is such an exasperating young woman. I think of Rose. It may be that Rose resented my coming first with Mr. L. Eunice—I cannot think it could be Eunice, but I did frequently have to come down firmly on her commonplace ideas. She wanted to be a Girl Guide, you remember. She was attracted to the Team Spirit—could it be that Eunice bore a grudge? Then there is Jenny. Now you know Jenny, how she went off and was never the same after she wanted to be an actress. She became so dull. Do you think she minded my telling her that she would never be a Fay Compton, far less a Sybil Thorndike? Finally, there is Monica. I half incline to suspect Monica. There is very little Soul behind the mathematical brain, and it may be that, in a fit of rage against that Beauty, Truth and Goodness which was beyond her grasp, she turned and betrayed me.

  “You, Sandy, as you see, I exempt from suspicion, since you had no reason whatsoever to betray me, indeed you have had the best part of me in my confidences and in the man I love. Think, if you can, who it could have been. I must know which one of you betrayed me …”

  Sandy replied like an enigmatic Pope: “If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayed does not apply ...”

  She heard again from Miss Brodie at the time of Mary Macgregor’s death, when the girl ran hither and thither in the hotel fire and was trapped by it. “If this is a judgment on poor Mary for betraying me, I am sure I would not have wished ...”

  “I’m afraid,” Jenny wrote, “Miss Brodie is past her prime. She keeps wanting to know who betrayed her. It isn’t at all like the old Miss Brodie, she was always so full of fight.”

  Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone. It was always in summer time that the Brodie set came to visit Sandy, for the nunnery was deep in the country.

  When Jenny came to see Sandy, who now bore the name Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, she told Sandy about her sudden falling in love with a man in Rome and there being nothing to be done about it. “Miss Brodie would have liked to know about it,” she said, “sinner as she was.”

  “Oh, she was quite an innocent in her way,” said Sandy, clutching the bars of the grille.

  Eunice, when she came, told Sandy, “We were at the Edinburgh Festival last year. I found Miss Brodie’s grave, I put some flowers on it. I’ve told my husband all the stories about her, sitting under the elm and all that; he thinks she was marvellous fun.”

  “So she was, really, when you think of it.”

  “Yes, she was,” said Eunice, “when she was in her prime.”

  Monica came again. “Before she died,” she said, “Miss Brodie thought it was you who betrayed her.”

  “It’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due,” said Sandy.

  “Well, wasn’t it due to Miss Brodie?”

  “Only up to a point,” said Sandy.

  And there was that day when the enquiring young man came to see Sandy because of her strange book of psychology, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” which had brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever.

  “What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?”

  Sandy said: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”

  A Biography of Muriel Spark

  Dame Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was an acclaimed Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose rhythmic prose and penchant for dark comedy made her one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive writers.

  Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg on February 1, 1918, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her engineer father, Bernar
d, was Scottish, while her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Maud, was English family. Their mixed-faith background would fuel many of the moral concerns of Spark’s later novels. Spark was raised in Edinburgh and from an early age attended James Gillespie’s High School. There her education was closely guided by an idiosyncratic teacher named Christina Kay, the inspiration for the title character in her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

  After school, Spark worked as a department store secretary, taught English, and took college courses before meeting Sydney Oswald Spark, whom she married in 1937. Sydney Spark had a teaching job in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Spark followed him there to get married in 1937. In 1938 she gave birth to a son, Robin. However, Sydney suffered from mental illness and was physically and verbally abusive. Spark left her husband, taking her son and his nanny with her in 1940, but because of World War II’s travel restrictions, she was unable to return to Britain until 1944.

  Once arrived, she settled in London, where she worked for the Foreign Office; after the war, she took on a series of writing and editing jobs, mostly for literary and trade magazines. She was the editor of Poetry Review for a few contentious years, until her insistence on searching out unknown poets and paying them for their work caused discord. It was while editing a collection of letters by Cardinal Newman that Spark began to explore Catholicism, eventually joining the Roman Catholic Church in 1954.