Title: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
First published: 1961
Description: Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving.
Subjects: Teacher-student relationships, Women teachers, Girls, Fiction, British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author), Large type books, Scotland, fiction, Teachers, fiction, Fiction, psychological, Study and teaching, Lovers, World War, 1939-1945, Young women, Travel, Canadians, Runaway husbands, Education, Bible, Fiction, general, British and irish drama (dramatic works by one author), Edinburgh (scotland), fiction, English literature, Social classes, Teachers, New York Times reviewed, Literary
Places: Edinburgh, Scotland
People: Miss Jean Brodie
Time periods: 1932