The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Fifteen years old at this time, Sandy stands with Mr. Lloyd in his studio admiring the portrait he has done of Rose Stanley in her gym tunic. Strangely, Rose’s face in the portrait resembles that of Miss Brodie. Mrs. Deirdre Lloyd, also present and dressed fashionably like a peasant, tells her husband to show Sandy “Red Velvet,” a portrait of Sandy wrapped in a “swathing of crimson velvet,” which makes her look one-armed like Mr. Lloyd and more physically developed than in life. Sandy is surprised to learn that Mr. Lloyd has also painted Monica Douglas and Eunice Gardiner—both images resemble Miss Brodie, which is not true of any of Mr. Lloyd’s portraits of people not in the Brodie set.

At this point, it seems to Sandy that the Brodie set might split up—which she thinks “perhaps a good thing.” While they are together in his studio, however, Mr. Lloyd confides in Sandy that he desires to paint all the Brodie girls, individually and then all together. Sandy thinks this an attempt to keep the girls a set despite their emerging individuality; she retorts, “‘We’d look like one big Miss Brodie,’” and gazes at Mr. Lloyd insolently. He laughs, kisses her “long and wetly,” and as she tries to run out of the studio he tells her, “‘You’re just about the ugliest little thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

Sandy then follows Mr. Lloyd downstairs, where she spends most of tea trying to understand her feelings about him kissing and insulting her. She is distracted, however, by the Lloyd children’s loudness, and by the Lloyds themselves, who both request that Sandy call them by their first names. Mrs. Lloyd asks Sandy to bring Miss Brodie to tea, but Teddy is resistant to the idea. Mr. Lloyd then asks Sandy about Miss Brodie’s relationship with Mr. Lowther: what does she see in him? Sandy replies sharply, “‘He sings to her.’” Mrs. Lloyd laughs and said that Miss Brodie sounds “‘a bit queer.’” Mr. Lloyd defends her and leaves the room, after which Sandy excuses herself too.

The narrative shifts back to around the time when Miss Ellen Kerr discovers what she believes to be Miss Brodie’s nightdress in Mr. Lowther’s house. Mr. Lowther over the past two years has considered marrying either one of the Kerr sisters, because Miss Brodie continually refuses to marry him. She would only make love with, and cook for, him. Mr. Lowther broods on the possibility that she prefers Mr. Lloyd’s long legs to his short ones.

Miss Brodie confides most of this in her girls as they grow from thirteen to fourteen, fourteen to fifteen, without ever stating or suggesting that she is sleeping with Mr. Lowther, for she is still determining which of the girls she can trust, and wants to alarm no parental suspicions. However, she finds in Sandy a girl in whom she can confide entirely.

In fact, in the autumn of 1935, while the two golf together, Miss Brodie tells Sandy that all of her ambitions are fixed on her and Rose. She asks Sandy if it seems that Jenny is becoming a bit insipid, and Sandy agrees. Miss Brodie goes on to criticize all the Brodie girls, Sandy and Rose excluded. Meanwhile, Sandy recalls to herself having seen Miss Lockhart golfing one Saturday with Mr. Lowther. The scene closes with Miss Brodie praising Sandy for her insight and Rose for her instinct; she also claims that she herself possesses both of these qualities.

Also around this time, Sandy would stand outside St. Giles’s Cathedral or the Tolbooth (an old municipal building in Edinburgh), and think about Calvinism, which had been spoken of only as a joke during her childhood, and which she feels deprived of. Sandy thinks that the Calvinists Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters are “the most real and rooted people” she knows, which she attributes to their belief in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which holds that God elects people to be sent to Heaven without reference to their conduct on earth. Sandy also senses Calvinism to be a formative influence on Miss Brodie herself: instead of being or not being elected by God to salvation, Miss Brodie “had elected herself to grace.”

Sandy also develops what she thinks of as Miss Brodie’s plan, unfolding over many years: Rose with her instinct is to have a love affair with Mr. Lloyd, as a great lover above the common moral code, and Sandy with her insight is to act as the informant on the affair. However, the narrator flashes forward and reveals that Mr. Lloyd has no more than a professional interest in Rose, and that it is Sandy who eventually has the affair with him, with Rose as the informant.

It was some time, however, before these things would come to pass. In the interim, Miss Brodie discusses art with Sandy and Rose and tells Rose that she has to realize the power within and fulfill herself, which she predicts will happen in Rose’s seventeenth or eighteenth year. Rose is also becoming famous for sex, not because she talks about or indulges in sex, but because she is popular with the boys. Teddy Lloyd completes a portrait of all the girls, whom “in a magical transfiguration,” all resemble Miss Brodie on Mr. Lloyd’s canvas. He paints Rose often because she is instinctively a good model and because she requires the money he gives her to fund her addiction to the cinema.

Sandy feels warmly toward Miss Brodie when she sees how misled she is in her idea of Rose, who is not as sexually adventurous as Miss Brodie thinks. Later in life, after she has become a nun, Sandy never feels more affection for Miss Brodie “then when she thought upon Miss Brodie as silly.”

Even so, the Brodie girls are still considered by their classmates to be lacking in team spirit and to be a social unit unto themselves. Were other people not to perceive them as such, the girls would no doubt have gone each her own way by the time they had reached the age of sixteen. But the girls do not drift apart, not least because they find their position enviable: they are reputed to have more fun than other girls, and this is the truth.

Miss Brodie also rallies her special girls around her each time her teaching methods are opposed by the school authorities. She tells her girls that if those authorities do not dismiss her on the grounds of her educational methods, they will attempt to dismiss her through slander. She defends her relationship with Mr. Lowther as a close friendship, even though she has neglected him of late. Sandy thinks that this is so because Miss Brodie’s sexual feelings are satisfied by proxy, as her plan for Rose to become Mr. Lloyd’s lover reaches fulfillment. Miss Brodie claims that, if she wished, she could marry Mr. Lowther tomorrow.

The morning after Miss Brodie makes this announcement, however, it is reported in the newspaper The Scotsman that Mr. Lowther has become engaged to Miss Lockhart. Nobody expected it, and Miss Brodie feels betrayed. The term following, Miss Brodie puts her spare energy into her plan for Rose to become Mr. Lloyd’s lover and for Sandy to become her informant on the affair. “What energy she had to spare from that,” the narrator says, “she now put into political ideas.”