The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Mary Macgregor, though she lives to be twenty-four years old, never realizes that Miss Brodie only shares her love story with her pupils. A year after World War II began, Mary joins the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service); she is incompetent in the service and much blamed. She meets her first and last boyfriend during this period, a corporal, who ends up deserting her. Thinking back to see if she had ever been happy, it occurs to Mary that it was those first years with Miss Brodie in the nineteen-thirties, listening to her stories and opinions, that had been the happiest time of her life—even though Miss Brodie had called Mary “‘such a clumsy girl’” and treated her condescendingly. Mary would later die during the war, while on leave, in a hotel fire.

Sandy Stranger, while Miss Brodie’s pupil, also has a feeling that her childhood is supposed to be the happiest time of her life, and on her tenth birthday she tells Jenny Gray as much. The two girls agree that unlike Miss Brodie their parents didn’t have primes, only sexual intercourse, which “was still a stupendous thought” to them, one they “had only lately lit upon.” Sandy goes on to say that Mr. Lloyd, the one-armed Art master to the Senior girls at Blaine, has just had a baby, and she infers from this that “‘he must have committed sex with his wife.’” While the girls continue discussing sex together, Sandy’s English mother (all the other schoolgirls’ mothers are Scottish) enters the room and asks if all is well, only to be driven away by a ferocious glance from Sandy.

Sandy then pulls out a notebook stashed away in her room, the first page of which bore the title “The Mountain Eyrie.” The notebook holds a story written by Sandy and Jenny about Miss Brodie’s dead lover Hugh, whom the girls have imagined to be alive. In the story, Hugh returns from the War and seeks out Miss Brodie, only to be told she has taken another lover. In turn, Hugh flees to an eyrie in the mountains, where Sandy and Jenny come upon him; he holds both captive. The story leaves off at the point at which Jenny escapes, Hugh pursues her, and Sandy tells him that Miss Brodie has not in fact taken another lover.

Sandy and Jenny resume work on the story, describing how the fictionalized Hugh flings Sandy away to pursue Jenny. The girls discuss the prospect of publishing their story when in their primes, then pretend to be witches, plan on going to an art gallery together to see the statue of a naked Greek god, speculate that Miss Brodie will escort them, and agree that she (Miss Brodie) is above sex. It is soon time for Jenny to go home. As she and her mother leave, Sandy looks out the window and wonders if Jenny shares her feeling of living a double life.

The narrative shifts to Miss Brodie’s classroom. It is close to the end of the school day, and Miss Brodie is reciting Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” Sandy, leading her double life to stave off boredom, is daydreaming that the Lady of Shalott herself has written the poem she exists in with white paint left out “‘by some heedless member of the Unemployed”; also that the Lady tells her, Sandy, that she is to be “‘ill-fated in love.’” Upon this, Sandy cries out in alarm in real life. Miss Brodie asks if Sandy is in pain, tells the girls that composure is one of a woman’s best assets, and then supports her case by gesturing to a print of the ever-composed Mona Lisa (a painting by da Vinci).

Miss Brodie invites Sandy to recite some poetry with her famous half-English vowels, and the narrator informs us that by this point Rose Stanley is not yet famous for sex. In fact, it is Eunice Gardiner who broaches the subject of sex with Sandy and Jenny by pointing out a sexual phrase in the Bible, which induces them to threaten to tell on her. Jenny, however, is famous at this point for her prettiness and her singing. Indeed, the long-bodied, short-legged, red- and gold-haired Mr. Lowther, the girls’ singing teacher, sometimes twitches her ringlets as she sings, even while Miss Brodie looks on.

One day after singing class, Miss Brodie gathers her class about her and tells them, “‘You girls are my vocation… I am dedicated to you in my prime.’” She then instructs the girls to walk in the composed manner of Sybil Thorndike (a famous English actress); Sandy does so to such an extent that Miss Brodie thinks her walk a parody and chastises her for having “‘a frivolous nature.’”

Back at the classroom, Rose Stanley reports to Miss Brodie that she (Rose) has ink on her blouse; Miss Brodie sends her to have it removed by the science teacher to the Senior girls, Miss Lockhart. Sandy even goes so far once in a while as to intentionally spill ink on her clothing at carefully calculated intervals because she so enjoys going to Miss Lockhart’s classroom, where she once saw a lesson in progress that had such order and discipline and productivity that it deeply impressed her as opposed to the freedom of Miss Brodie’s class. After Rose, in the present case, returns to the classroom, Miss Brodie asserts that “‘art is greater than science.’”

This part of the novel is set in 1931, during the first of two winters that the girls spend with Miss Brodie, who has already selected her favorites—the girls who will make up the Brodie set. She swears them to secrecy before telling them about her personal life and professional feud with Miss Mackay.

Eunice Gardiner is at first very quiet, and it is strange that she joins the Brodie set at all. Eventually, though, she amuses her peers and Miss Brodie herself by doing cartwheels on the carpet. Miss Brodie calls her “‘an Ariel’” (a spirit in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest). After that, Eunice becomes chatty and continues to entertain, though she is not allowed to do cartwheels on Sundays “for in many ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye.”

Some twenty-eight years after she did the splits in Miss Brodie’s apartment, Eunice, who has become a nurse and married a doctor by now, tells her husband while the two are at home one evening that when they visit Edinburgh for the Festival he should remind her to visit Miss Brodie’s grave. The two proceed to discuss Miss Brodie, whom Eunice claims “‘was sane as anything.’” She also tells her husband that Miss Brodie died after World War II, after being betrayed by an unknown member of the Brodie set and forced to retire.

The narrator says that it is now time to discuss a long walk Miss Brodie leads her favorites on through the old parts of Edinburgh, one Friday in March. Sandy is walking alongside Mary Macgregor because Jenny is absent from the outing. Sandy is daydreaming about assisting Alan Breck, a character whom Sandy is familiar with after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped. Miss Brodie encourages Mary to speak with Sandy, but Mary says that Sandy won’t speak with her. Miss Brodie replies, “‘Sandy cannot talk to you if you are so stupid and disagreeable.’”

As they walk, Sandy nags at Mary for staring at an Indian student, then for lagging behind and for having poor posture. When an impulse to be kind to Mary comes over her, Sandy hears Miss Brodie’s voice, which “arrested the urge.” Sandy understands then that the girls are a body with Miss Brodie at the head, obedient to the destiny of Miss Brodie herself, “as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose.” She becomes frightened of being kind to Mary then, since doing so would separate her from the group. She resumes nagging Mary “with the feeling that if you did a thing a lot of times, you made it into a right thing.”

The Brodie set and Miss Brodie arrive at the Meadows, a large public park, where they pass a group of Girl Guides, or Girl Scout Brownies. Miss Brodie’s students ask her about whether they should join the Brownies and Guides, but she implies that it is not for the crème de la crème. Sandy recalls to herself just then Miss Brodie’s admiration for Mussolini’s marching troops, the fascisti, whom Miss Brodie has a picture of. Mussolini and his fascisti had put an end to unemployment, Sandy recalls, and it also occurs to her that the Brodie set is like Miss Brodie’s fascisti, and that the Girl Guides are too much of a rival fascisti for Miss Brodie to bear. Sandy thinks about joining the Brownies for a moment before “group-fright seized her again…she loved Miss Brodie.”

The girls and Miss Brodie pass through the slums of the Old Town, then to the great square of the Grassmarket. Miss Brodie comments that the Scots owe a lot to the French. As they walk, Sandy feels as though she’s in a different country, full of new smells, new shapes, and poor people. The girls hold hands nervously; they see a man proposing to a woman, ringed in by a crowd. Throughout her life, speaking with other people raised in Edinburgh, Sandy is shocked to think about how little she has seen of Edinburgh, how little she has seen of the nineteen-thirties.

The narrative flash-forwards: Sandy, in middle age, is a nun called Sister Helena. She has published a famous psychological treatise, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” and is therefore allowed, as no other nuns are, to have visitors. A young man visiting her, speaking with her through a grille, asks her about her formative influences—the poets W.H Auden or T.S. Eliot? the Spanish Civil War? Calvinism (a branch of Protestant Christianity)? Sister Helena responds that it is none other than Miss Jean Brodie.

The narrative shifts back to the long walk Sandy and the rest of the Brodie set are having with Miss Brodie through Edinburgh. As they pass St. Giles’s Cathedral, the narrator explains that the girls, brought up per several different Christian denominations, once asked Miss Brodie about religion and she, though “adhering to the strict Church of Scotland habits of her youth,” introduced atheism to them, which she herself had learned about having recently taken a course in comparative religion at the University.

The walk now has brought the girls and their teacher to Chambers Street. There Miss Brodie explains that she and Miss Mackay are scheduled to meet, presumably because Miss Mackay wants to question Miss Brodie’s methods of instruction. Miss Brodie explains to the girls that her conception of education, from the Latin roots e ‘out’ and duco ‘lead,’ is a leading out of what is already in a girl’s soul. In contrast, she describes Miss Mackay as intruding into girls’ minds. Miss Brodie also tells the girls that Miss Mackay has accused her of putting ideas into her students’ heads. “‘Never let it be said that I put ideas into your heads,’” she instructs them before quizzing the daydreaming Sandy on what education is.

The walk continues. Rose Stanley points out a French car; Miss Brodie chastises her for having a mind “‘full of motor cars’” and for not paying attention to her conversation. Sandy, meanwhile, is fantasizing about dinner with Alan Breck, but is disturbed to think of being passionately swept away into having intercourse with him. Surely people have time to think before being swept away, she wonders. She also imagines that it would be rude for people to take their clothes off in front of one another, which she hopes prevents them from getting swept away by passion. The narrator goes on to state that Miss Brodie would later be amazed, awed, and enthused by Rose’s playing the role of the great lover, during that time when she became famous for sex. Miss Brodie is not explicitly speaking to the girls about sex just yet, however.

Miss Brodie continues speaking of Miss Mackay, defending her own methods, encouraging her girls to study hard for their end-of-term examinations, and claiming that no one could accuse her of impropriety unless one of her girls betrayed her and distorted the truth. Rose says, “‘Miss Mackay has an awfully red face, with the veins all showing,’” but Miss Brodie chastises her, saying it would be disloyal were she, Miss Brodie, to permit talk like that of her superior.

As the walkers arrive at the end of Lauriston Place, they see a line of unemployed men. Miss Brodie explains the men were waiting for their share of money from the labor bureau, which some would spend on drink instead of food for their families. Miss Brodie tells her girls to pray for these men, and reminds them that Italy had no unemployment problem. Sandy becomes frightened looking at the unemployed men, then thinks of their starving children and wants to cry. She wishes Jenny were with her, “because Jenny cried easily about poor children.” Sandy turns to Mary then and tells her to stop pushing, even though Mary claims not to be pushing at all.

The long walk is over. Sandy decides not to go to Miss Brodie’s for tea, but instead takes the tramcar home. Later, however, when she thinks about Eunice doing somersaults and splits in Miss Brodie’s kitchen, she wishes she had gone to tea after all. She then takes out her notebook which holds “The Mountain Eyrie,” the “true love story of Miss Jean Brodie,” and adds a chapter to it.