This was a beautiful little book with a quintessentially Edinburgh feel to it. Set around the 1930s, most of the narrative takes place at a school for girls. A group of six are selected by Miss Brodie, a teacher in her prime, to be the creme de la creme of their age group - The Brodie Set. There are periodic flashes forward to the student’s and teacher’s later lives so the fate of the characters are known. The book has some narrative anticipation but its charms are not about finding out what happens next. The joy of the book was more in the ingenious details and effortless touches Spark uses to construct such a vivid world. The aphorisms of Miss Brodie, the brief but deep characterisations of the members of the set and the sketch of the art master’s home life and marital infidelities. The prose is also excellent and never clunky.
A group of school friends is a familiar setting and a good way to establish individual identities within a larger collective one. The Brodie Set is an extreme example of this tendency towards cliques but it’s believable and feels authentic. The level of pupil-teacher interaction is also unlikely today but could be credible in the 30s. Miss Brodie instructs the girls in a wide range of subjects outwith the conventional school curriculum with a heavy focus on her own history, travels and life. With the exception of Sandy, who’s Miss Brodie’s special confidante and whose character is fleshed in more detail, the characterisation of the other members is largely limited to their future fates or descriptions of what they’re known for as schoolgirls. Jenny is known for her beauty, Rose is ‘famous for sex’, Eunice is famous for gymnastics and swimming, Monica is known for her mathematical abilities and her temper and Mary is famous for being the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. The details are scant but are oft repeated and so well chosen that the overall effect is very successful.
The star of the show is Miss Jean Brodie. She chooses to dedicate her prime to educating her set in what she deems the original sense of the Latin verb ‘educere’ - to lead out. This is exactly the kind of maxim that makes Miss Brodie so believable and engaging as a character. The leading out takes the form of stories about her love life, trips to the theatre and art galleries, studies of the classics and lectures on the benefits of facism. It all feels perfect for a middle class Edinburgh school teacher. She carries a self confident feeling of always being in the right and the primary school teacher’s penchant for unequivocal statements. Nonetheless, there’s also a slightly deranged, even desperate undercurrent to her character that’s never encountered directly. Instead, it’s hinted at throughout the novel. Who could disagree with her lofty aims of leading the girls out into adulthood through the means of a practical and well-rounded education? But in practice, her obsession with Italian facism and the love lives of some of the set seem misguided and inappropriate.
It’s the same when it comes to her own love life. She eschews love in favour of her project of educating the girls, which immediately made me wonder what happened to her in the past. Nonetheless, she falls in love with the art master, who loves her back, but won’t pursue it because he is married. Instead, she conceives a highly questionable plan that Rose, the most beautiful of the set, should have an affair with him instead. The singing master is also in love with her and she starts to sleep with him after she has abandoned her romance with the art master. It’s a rather half-hearted affair on Miss Brodie’s part, with more emphasis on fattening him up than on romantic development, and he eventually marries another teacher. I felt like there was some unmentioned personal tragedy that perpetually loomed over Miss Brodie.
As a reader, we never enter the inner world of Miss Brodie. On the outside, she appears steadfast and resolute in her beliefs and actions but their very nature made me wonder where they came from. In a sense, readers encounter Miss Brodie as her pupils would have. We see the face that Miss Brodie wants to show to the world but never the true motivations behind the mask or the inner monologue that produces and sustains it. She makes a big show of the dedication of her prime to the education of her set, but what is her personal stake in this? The events of the story show it can’t simply be an altruistic love of education. As Sandy comments after betraying Miss Brodie, in a strikingly similar fashion to the pronouncements of the lady herself, ‘it’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due’. Contrary to Miss Brodie’s overtly stated loyalty to the education of the girls, is she really using them and abusing the position of power she holds over them at an impressionable age? There’s a fevered quality about her dedication to the set, her love of facism and her unusual approach to romance that makes it seem like a retaliation against something horrible in her past, which readers never learn anything about.
The betrayal of Miss Brodie by Sandy, who she never suspects, is another excellent facet of the plot. The headmistress, Miss McKay, is suspicious of Miss Brodie’s methods and periodically tries to infiltrate the set to gather intelligence to use against her. Initially I felt like Sandy’s betrayal was an unnecessarily harsh treatment of a pitiable and well intentioned middle aged woman. However, without knowing the true reasons for Miss Brodie’s condition and way of life, it became more and more ambiguous, especially when considered in the light of her more hare-brained schemes. Do Sandy and the rest of the set actually have legitimate grievances for their treatment by Miss Brodie?
For a book of less than 200 pages, it contained so much. The evocative, yet lightly sketched, characters. The initial love triangle between the teachers and then the planned, and actual, affairs of members of the set with Mr Lloyd. The headmistress’s scheming against Miss Brodie and her ultimate betrayal by Sandy. Above all, it was a fascinating character study of Miss Brodie herself examined through the lens of the six set members. It was thoroughly enjoyable and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it, especially to any Edinburgh natives!
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