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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Authority and Social Groups
Education vs. Intrusion
Sexuality, One’s Prime, and Spinsterhood
Religion, Predestination, and Narrative Structure
Insight, Instinct, and Transfiguration
Summary
Analysis
A group of five teenage boys and five sixteen-year-old girls are socializing near the gates of the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh, Scotland, the boys positioning their bicycles so as to form “a protective fence…between the sexes.” The girls belong to the “Brodie set,” named after their former teacher Miss Jean Brodie. This is what they have been called ever since they were students at the Junior school, and even their headmistress (later identified as Miss Mackay) calls them this “in scorn”; the girls moved from the Junior to the Senior school at the age of twelve.
The boys and girls are on the brink of sexual maturity and are very conscious of their sexuality: the “protective fence” of bicycles is a sign of this consciousness as well as of sexual tension. For the members of the Brodie set, these boys represent a way of life altogether different from that which they’ve known at Blaine with Miss Brodie, a life not centered on the personality and opinions of a charismatic mentor.
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Even when they are students at the Junior school, the Brodie girls are recognizable as Miss Jean Brodie’s pupils because they were “vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculum”—everything from Mussolini (the fascist Prime Minister of Italy during World War II) to methods of cleaning the skin with cream and witch-hazel, from Miss Brodie’s love life to “those who considered the Bible to be untrue.”
Miss Brodie is an unorthodox teacher, instructing students not in accordance with the authorized curriculum but her own interests, which are socially unconventional, even radical, and often inappropriate. This both expands her students’ horizons but also denies them a well-rounded education, effectively placing Miss Brodie's opinions on a pedestal.
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By the age of sixteen, the girls have adapted to the other authority figures at the school, yet remain unmistakably influenced by Miss Brodie. They are famous schoolwide in the sense that they are held in suspicion and disliked; they have no team spirit and have little in common with each other than remaining friends with Miss Brodie, who still teaches at that time in the Junior department despite being “held in great suspicion.”
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Each girl in the Brodie set is famous for something. Monica Douglas, red-nosed and fat-legged, is a prefect famous for her mathematical ability and violent anger. Rose Stanley is famous for sex. Eunice Gardiner, small and neat, is famous for “her spritely gymnastics and glamorous swimming.” Sandy Stranger is notorious for her “small, almost non-existent, eyes” and famous for her vowel sounds, which long ago so enraptured Miss Brodie that she asked Sandy to recite a stanza from Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott.” “‘Where there is no vision…the people perish,’” Miss Brodie had said on that occasion. The prettiest and most graceful member of the Brodie set is Jenny Gray, who is Sandy’s best friend and wants to be an actress.
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The narrative returns to the scene of the boys and girls socializing. One of the five boys, named Andrew, is insulting Jenny about her way of speech. She tells him not to be a lout, but he and two other boys (both also named Andrew) just mimic her, to the laughter of the girls present. Just then the final member of the Brodie set, Mary Macgregor, comes along, accompanied by an outsider to the set, Joyce Emily Hammond, a very rich girl and delinquent sent to Blaine as a last resort. Joyce Emily is trying very hard to become a member of the Brodie set, but there is no chance of it.
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Joyce Emily says that a teacher is coming, and two of the Andrews depart on their bicycles while the other three boys defiantly remain. The teacher turns out to be Miss Jean Brodie herself. She excuses the boys, walks away with all of the girls, but soon excuses Joyce as well, leaving the Brodie set “to their secret life as it had been six years ago in their childhood.” Following behind, Sandy remembers one of Miss Brodie’s sayings from that time: “‘I am putting old heads on your young shoulders…and all my pupils are the crème de la crème.’”
As they walk together, Miss Brodie invites the six girls to supper, and insists that Jenny come even though she has plans with the Dramatic Society; for there is a plot afoot, Miss Brodie says, to force her to resign her teaching post (there have been such plots afoot before). It has been suggested that Miss Brodie apply to “one of the progressive schools,” but she thinks these schools “crank,” eccentric, and insists that Blaine needs her to elevate their program. “‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life,’” Miss Brodie says. The Brodie set “smile[s] in understanding of various kinds.”
Rose asks who is responsible for the plot, and Miss Brodie says that they would discuss that together at supper, assuring the girls nonetheless that those who opposed her would not succeed. The girls agree. Miss Brodie concludes by saying that she is still in her prime, tells the girls that “‘it is important to recognize the years of one’s prime’”; then she boards a tramcar and departs.
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The narrative shifts to six years before. Miss Brodie is leading her new class of ten-year-old girls to the garden for a history lesson. On the way, they stop outside of the headmistress Miss Mackay’s office, where a poster of Stanley Baldwin (a British Prime Minister) is hanging, with the words “Safety First.” Miss Brodie tells her class that Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first, not safety. This is the girls’ first intimation that Miss Brodie is at odds with the rest of the teaching staff and, indeed, that adults could differ from one another at all.
Outside, Miss Brodie then instructs her girls to hold up their books as if doing their history lesson, but tells them instead about her summer holiday in Egypt, among other subjects like skin care. She asks who the greatest Italian painter is, and when one girl responds that it is Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie says, “‘That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favorite.’”
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Next Miss Brodie tells the girls that her prime has truly begun and that they themselves must be able to recognize their primes and live life to the full during those years. Observing meanwhile that Mary is looking at something under her desk, Miss Brodie asks her what it is: “‘a comic paper,’” Mary replied. Miss Brodie tells Mary that she is too old for comic papers, takes “the colored sheets” of Tiger Tim’s from her, and tears the comic paper up “beyond redemption.” She then returns to the subject of her prime, checking to make sure that Sandy has been paying attention, which she has.
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Later that same autumn, during the hour for English grammar, Miss Brodie also tells her class about a man she had been engaged to (later identified as Hugh). He had died during World War I on Flanders’ Field a week before the Armistice. After interrupting herself to chastise Sandy for having her sleeves rolled up, Miss Brodie goes on: her fiancé had been poor, a countryman from Ayrshire (a county in Scotland), and upon proposing he had told her, “‘We shall have to drink water and walk slow,’” which, Miss Brodie explains to her class, meant that the couple would have to “‘live quietly.’” When Miss Brodie asks Rose what “We shall have to drink water and walk slow” means, the young student just regurgitates her teacher’s own translation of the saying.
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As Miss Brodie is telling the story of her fiancé, Miss Mackay approaches. Several of the girls in the class are crying at this point over Hugh’s fate, and their headmistress inquires as to why. Miss Brodie explains that she has been telling a story as part of their history lesson; Miss Mackay in turn tells the girls that they should not be crying over history at the age of ten. After Miss Mackay goes, Miss Brodie tells her class that they did well in not answering Miss Mackay’s question: “‘Speech is silver but silence is golden’” she says. She then quizzes Mary as to what she has just said, but Mary hasn’t been paying attention. “‘If only you small girls would listen to me,’” Miss Brodie had said, “‘I would make of you the crème de la crème.’”
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