The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

The narrator says that Miss Brodie is not unique at this point in her prime, and that there are “legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties,” progressive spinsters interested in art and social welfare, assistants with the Scottish Nationalist Movement, feminists who spoke with men man-to-man. Miss Brodie is unique only in that the women like her aren’t, for the most part, schoolteachers, who tend to be of a “more orderly type.” Miss Brodie is also unique because she trusts herself to change her mind and learn, even on ethical question—even in her prime Miss Brodie is developing, growing.

The narrative reopens in 1931, a year into Miss Brodie’s prime. For the girls in the Brodie set, sex is at this time the be-all and end-all. A suntanned Miss Brodie opens the term by discussing her trip to London and Italy, praising Mussolini as “‘one of the greatest men in the world.’” Miss Mackay enters the classroom and encourages the girls to have a good year.

After Miss Mackay leaves her classroom, Miss Brodie restates that an education is a leading out, calls Mary “‘stupid’” for not knowing what the word “nasally” means, and exults over having seen the Coliseum in Rome where gladiators hailed Caesar, among other things. She also gives the girls apples from Mr. Lowther’s orchard. The only thing, it would seem, that Miss Brodie doesn’t do is to discuss history, which is what her girls are supposed to be studying.

Even before the official opening of her prime, Miss Brodie’s colleagues at the Junior school had been turning against her—all save Mr. Gordon Lowther and Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the only men on the staff. Both “were already a little in love with Miss Brodie,” and have subconsciously begun to act as rivals for her attention. The girls in the Brodie set realize that Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd are romantically interested in their teacher before Miss Brodie herself does.

Though Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd look like one another, both having red-gold coloring, “habitual acquaintance” proves otherwise. Mr. Lloyd, the art master, is more handsome and more sophisticated, rumored to be half Welsh, half English. He paints with his right arm; he lost his left during World War I.

Miss Brodie’s class has up to this point had only one opportunity to size up Mr. Lloyd closely, during an art lesson with Miss Brodie in attendance. The scene is this: Mr. Lloyd is tracing with his pointer the lines of a painting by Botticelli, the Primavera; the schoolgirls can’t suppress their laughter when he traces the lines of the painted ladies’ bottoms. Miss Brodie calls the girls “‘Philistines’” (that is, ignorant of artistic value). Sandy continues laughing and Miss Brodie chastises her. Mary also continues laughing; she would not have laughed at all had the other girls not laughed, “for she was too stupid,” the narrator says, “to have any sex-wits of her own.” Nonetheless, Miss Brodie takes Mary by the arm and shuts her out of the room.

Mr. Lloyd then continues the lesson, turning to a painting of Madonna and Child without any sense of religious awe, only a “very artistic attitude,” which surprises the religious girls. He turns to Miss Brodie to see if she approves of this attitude, and she smiles “as would a goddess with superior understanding smile to a god.”

It is not long after this that Monica Douglas reports to the Brodie set that she saw Mr. Lloyd kiss Miss Brodie. The other girls don’t really believe her, however, and question her over details, like when the kiss occurred, where, and how long it lasted. Sandy, most dissatisfied with Monica’s account, reenacts the kiss several times to test its plausibility. When Miss Brodie enters the classroom during the fourth of these reenactments, she asks Sandy what she was doing. “‘Only playing,’” the girl says.

All through the term till Christmas, the Brodie set continues to question whether Miss Brodie is capable of being kissed and kissing They decide, at last, to keep the incident a secret. Meanwhile, Miss Brodie changes: she wears newer clothes and an amber necklace, and the girls watch her belly for signs of swelling.

The other Junior teachers have begun to say good morning to Miss Brodie more graciously at this time as well, but still with an edge of scorn. The only two teachers who do not judge Miss Brodie at all are the two sewing teachers, Miss Ellen and Alison Kerr, who think all of their colleagues who teach academic subjects to be “above criticism.” During her class’s sewing lessons, Miss Brodie reads aloud from the novel Jane Eyre while her girls, listening, prick their thumbs “so that interesting little spots of blood might appear on the stuff they were sewing.”

Singing lessons with Mr. Lowther are different now, for Miss Brodie seems agitated before, during, and after them; she also wears “her newest clothes on singing days.” Sandy continues to disbelieve that Monica had seen Miss Brodie kiss Mr. Lloyd; in fact, only Rose, who is not at all and never will be curious about sex, believes Monica. However, later in the nineteen-fifties, when Monica visits Sandy at the convent and comments once again that as a girl she had seen Mr. Lloyd kiss Miss Brodie, Sandy says, “‘I know you did.’”

The narrative shifts back in time: Sandy knew about the kiss even before Miss Brodie tells her about it one day after the end of the war in the nineteen-forties. Sandy and Miss Brodie are eating at the Braid Hills Hotel; Miss Brodie has been forced to retire by this point and is by her own admission past her prime. She tells Sandy that Teddy Lloyd had loved her greatly, but that she had renounced him because he was married, even though the two share what Miss Brodie calls “‘the artistic nature.’”

During this post-war meal with Sandy, Miss Brodie also recalls the time when in the autumn of 1931 she took a leave of absence, seemingly on account of illness. In her place, the gaunt Miss Gaunt taught her class—far more rigorously and demandingly, to the girls’ shock. Even the sewing teachers Miss Ellen and Allison Kerr felt cowed by Miss Gaunt. Sandy and Jenny used to giggle watching the shuttles of the sewing machines go up and down, which reminded them of sex, but Miss Gaunt’s presence “had a definite subtracting effect from the sexual significance of everything.”

Sandy recalls to herself that, during one sewing class, Miss Gaunt discussed her brother with Miss Ellen and Allison Kerr, who was the minister of the parish church the three women attended—a fact which made the Kerr sisters nervous around Miss Gaunt. Meanwhile, Sandy was daydreaming about being in love with Mr. Edward Rochester, a character from the novel Jane Eyre. She was distracted when Miss Gaunt mentioned that Mr. Lowther was not at school that week, ill like Miss Brodie.

Sandy further recalls to herself that, to break up the sexless gloom imposed by Miss Gaunt, she hypothesized with Jenny that Miss Brodie was having a love affair not with Mr. Lloyd but Mr. Lowther, and Jenny in particular imagined how the two teachers would initiate sexual intercourse together. They paused their conversation when Eunice Gardiner came over, for Eunice had “taken a religious turn,” albeit a short-lived one, and therefore “was not to be trusted”.

The narrative returns to the nineteen-forties, to the meal Miss Brodie and Sandy are sharing at the Braid Hills Hotel. Miss Brodie goes on to tell Sandy that, since she renounced Mr. Lloyd, the love of her prime, she began an affair with Mr. Lowther as a cure. Sandy doubts, however, that this is the whole story. As the meal progresses, Miss Brodie eventually returns to wondering which of the Brodie set betrayed her, thereby forcing her to retire. Was it Mary? Rose? “It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman. What does she mean by ‘betray’?”

Back in 1931, after her two weeks’ absence, Miss Brodie returns to her teaching post, thereby relieving Miss Gaunt of her duties. Mr. Lowther’s singing class goes on as usual, Miss Brodie now playing the accompaniment on the piano. Mr. Lowther no longer plays with Jenny’s curls. Sandy is almost sure that Mr. Lowther loves Miss Brodie and that Miss Brodie loves Mr. Lloyd. The narrator also foreshadows here, although only vaguely, that Rose Stanley later becomes involved in the love affair between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lloyd.

During the Easter term, the Junior girls have to decide whether they will study on the Modern or Classical side at the Senior school. Miss Brodie, insisting the girls’ make the choice of their own free will, insinuates a strong preference for the Classical side.

Only Eunice from the Brodie set considers going on the Modern side. Eunice is too pious at this time for Miss Brodie’s liking. When she opts to go to a social gathering rather than accompany Miss Brodie and the set to the Empire Theatre to watch the world famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova dance in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Miss Brodie criticizes Eunice for allegedly misusing the word “social”, and implies that Eunice would be missing out on watching “‘a great moment in eternity.’” All that term Sandy daydreams about dancing with Anna Pavlova.

The narrative rapidly shifts forward to a few weeks before Miss Brodie’s death. She is in a nursing home and learns then from Monica Douglas that Sandy had gone to a convent to become a nun. Miss Brodie wonders whether Sandy did that to annoy her, and also wonders whether it might be Sandy who had betrayed her.

The narrative jumps back to the Easter (spring) term of 1931, when the girls are deciding whether to go to the Modern or Classical side. Miss Mackay, at that point the headmistress, who favors the Modern side, invites Sandy, Jenny, and Mary over for tea, to discuss the decision with them. Mary’s grades are too low for her to go to the Classical side, which makes her despondent given Miss Brodie’s preference for the Classical. Despite Miss Mackay’s appeals, Sandy and Jenny also opt for the Classical side, and their grades permit it.

Miss Mackay then begins speaking generously of Miss Brodie, with the goal of pumping incriminating facts about her out of Sandy, Jenny, and Mary. Miss Mackay asks about the girls’ cultural interests, which Mary reports to be stories. When the headmistress goes on to ask what subjects Miss Brodie discusses in her stories, Sandy and Jenny, too readily, as though with premeditation, reply “‘History.’” After Miss Mackay excuses the girls, they report back to Miss Brodie some but not all of this conversation.

Toward the end of the Easter holidays, Jenny is walking out alone by the Water of Leith (a river in Scotland), when a man calls her over and exposes his genitalia to her. She runs away unharmed, unpursued, to be soon surrounded by horrified family members. A policewoman comes in to question Jenny about the incident.

These events cause quite a stir among the Brodie set. Sandy, just on the verge of obtaining permission to take walks alone, is denied permission after all. However, the events also provide the girls much to discuss: namely, the man who exposed himself and the policewoman. Indeed, Sandy stops daydreaming about Alan Breck and Mr. Rochester and instead falls in love with this policewoman, whom she questions Jenny about with enthusiasm. Sandy is troubled, though, that the policewoman in real life pronounced the word “nasty” as “nesty.”

Nonetheless, Sandy continues to daydream about serving on the Force with the policewoman, whom she names in her imagination Sergeant Anne Grey. Sandy, picking up police jargon by reading the Sunday paper, pretends to be on the Force with Sergeant Grey, with the mission of eliminating sex altogether. Sandy even confides in her imaginary partner that the two need to look into Miss Brodie’s “‘liaison with Gordon Lowther.’” Sandy and Jenny also begin composing a fictionalized love correspondence between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther.

Back at school after the Easter holidays, Sandy and Jenny keep secret the “Water of Leith affair”; one morning Sandy even goes so far as to ask Jenny to keep it a secret from Miss Brodie. Her reasons for this request are motivated by something that happened earlier that day: Miss Brodie specifically sent Rose to help Mr. Lloyd carry art supplies back to the classroom and it occurred to Jenny and Sandy that Rose looked different. They speculated that she had had her first menstrual cycle. The girls end up forgetting about the man who exposed himself and focus more and more on the policewoman as the term goes on.

During the last few months of her teaching the Brodie girls at Blaine, Miss Brodie makes “herself adorable”—no bickering and no irritability save with Mary. Class is often held outside on benches under an elm, and Miss Brodie elaborates on her love story with the soldier Hugh, claiming for the first time that he was also a talented singer and painter: “I think the painter was the real Hugh,’” she says. It becomes clear to Sandy and Jenny, as they discuss it alone, that Miss Brodie was fitting her old love story about Hugh to her new one involving Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Lowther. Sandy admires this narrative technique, but also feels a “pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct.” That spring, we also learn from the narrator, Jenny’s mother is expecting a baby.

During a short vacation, while visiting Jenny’s aunt in the coastal town of Crail in the Scottish region of Fife, Sandy and Jenny complete their fictionalized love correspondence between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther. At the mouth of a cave, they have written the last of it, where they struggle to put their teacher “in both a favourable and an unfavourable light.” They have imagined a sexual encounter between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther set on a storm-embattled Scottish peak called Arthur’s Seat, and conclude their series of letters with one in which the fictionalized Miss Brodie declines Mr. Lowther’s marriage proposal and, among other things, congratulates her lover “‘warmly upon [his] sexual intercourse, as well as [his] singing.’”

After completing the love correspondence, Sandy and Jenny read it from end to end, and wonder whether they should cast it out to sea or bury it. They at last decide to bury it, “and never saw it again.” They walk back to Crail then, full of plans and joy.