The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The headmistress of Blaine, Miss Mackay, never gives up on indirectly pumping the Brodie girls for incriminating evidence on Miss Brodie, but now, seven years into their friendship with her, the girls cannot incriminate their former teacher without incriminating themselves at the same time. One time Miss Mackay tries to trick Sandy into betraying that Miss Brodie drinks too much. But Miss Brodie really doesn’t drink much at all, and Sandy says as much.

One of Miss Brodie’s greatest admirers is Joyce Emily Hammond, a very rich and delinquent girl sent to Blaine as a last resort (she does not act like a delinquent at Blaine, however). Because Joyce Emily has been enrolled in and ejected or removed from so many schools recently, her parents request that they not buy Blaine uniforms for her till a trial period has elapsed. This is granted, and so Joyce Emily goes about in dark green while the other girls wear deep violet. She boasts of having five sets of discarded uniforms in her closet, along with hair she cut from one of her past governess’s heads, a post office savings book taken from a past governess, and a burnt pillowcase which Joyce Emily set fire to while a governess’s head rested on it.

Joyce Emily very much wants to attach herself to the Brodie set, but those girls disapprove of her because of her green clothes and her shiny car and chauffeur; besides, they are busy studying for examinations and doing other school activities. In fact, nobody wants Joyce Emily less than the Brodie girls, who are among the brightest in the school. The fact of the Brodie set’s intelligence, of course, makes it all the more difficult for Miss Mackay to discredit Miss Brodie.

Moreover, the Brodie girls have outside interests, too, at this point in their lives in 1937. Eunice has a boyfriend; Monica and Mary take groceries to people living in slums; Jenny is acting; Rose models for Teddy Lloyd, sometimes accompanied by Sandy who toys with the idea of inducing Mr. Lloyd to kiss her again. The girls also visit Miss Brodie in small groups and all together. So they have little time for Joyce Emily.

Miss Brodie, however, does make time for Joyce Emily. The Brodie girls resent this, but are also relieved that Miss Brodie takes Joyce Emily to tea and the theater alone, without obliging them to share Joyce Emily’s company.

Joyce Emily brags that her brother, a student at Oxford, has gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and that she, dark and “rather mad,” wants to go too and march with a gun. Nobody takes this seriously, however, for everybody at the school is “anti-Franco” if they are anything at all (Francisco Franco was a nationalist general who with others initiated a civil war in Spain, successfully overthrowing the democratic Spanish Republic; after the war, he became the leader of the new fascist Spanish regime). However, Joyce Emily does end up running away to Spain that year; she is swiftly, shockingly killed in an accident when the train she is travelling in is attacked. The school holds a remembrance service for her.

By their last year at Blaine, only four of the Brodie girls remain: Mary has gone off to be a typist, and Jenny has enrolled at a school of dramatic art. While completing studies at Blaine, Eunice thinks she will go on to study modern languages, but becomes a nurse instead; Monica goes into science, Sandy into psychology. Rose, inheriting her father’s instinctive and “merry carnality,” makes a good marriage soon after she leaves school and “shook off Miss Brodie’s influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat.”

Miss Brodie will never know how easily Rose shook off her influence. She still confides in Sandy that she thinks Rose and Mr. Lloyd will become lovers, which is not so much a theory as part of Miss Brodie’s game in bringing the two together. Sandy perceives that Miss Brodie “was obsessed by the need for Rose to sleep with the man she herself was in love with.”

Sandy still visits the Lloyds during this period, and indeed has gotten herself “a folkweave shirt” like those that Mrs. Deirdre Lloyd wears. She psychologizes the Lloyds while with them; and when she looks on as Mr. Lloyd paints a portrait of Rose nude, Sandy notices that the image emerging resembles Rose but even more than that it resembles Miss Brodie. Sandy has become very interested in Mr. Lloyd’s mind, “so involved with Miss Brodie as it was, and not accounting her ridiculous.”

Sandy has told Miss Brodie—and Miss Brodie loves to hear it—that all of Mr. Lloyd’s portraits reflect her. Miss Brodie calls herself Mr. Lloyd’s Muse and predicts that Rose will take her place. Sandy, on the other hand, thinks, “She thinks she is Providence… she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end.” Sandy also thinks, perhaps based on her readings in psychology, Miss Brodie is “an unconscious lesbian.”

Much later, after Sandy has become a nun, Rose comes to visit her; Rose has been married for a long time at that point to a successful businessman. The two women agree that Miss Brodie was dedicated to her girls, and Sandy explains that Miss Brodie was forced to retire because of her politics.

Monica also comes to visit Sandy when both are adult women, ostensibly seeking marital advice, for she had thrown a piece of burning coal at her sister-in-law, which caused her husband to demand a separation. The two instead talk of Miss Brodie: Sandy explains that Rose never did sleep with Teddy Lloyd, that Miss Brodie did indeed love the artist, and so her renunciation of him was in fact real, not a mere joke as both Sandy and Monica had thought at the time.

The narrative shifts back to the summer of 1938, after the last of the Brodie girls have left Blaine. Miss Brodie has gone to Germany and Austria for the summer, while Sandy reads psychology and goes often to the Lloyds’ to sit for her own portrait, sometimes accompanied by Rose. Once, when Sandy and Mr. Lloyd are all alone because his wife and family are away, Sandy tells him that all his portraits, “even that of the littlest Lloyd baby,” are turning out to resemble Miss Brodie, and she gives him an insolent stare. As he had three years before, Mr. Lloyd kisses Sandy, and the two begin a love affair that lasts for five weeks.

During the time of their affair, Mr. Lloyd paints Sandy a little. She tells him that he is making her look like Miss Jean Brodie in the portrait and he begins a new canvas, “but it was the same again.” Sandy asks Mr. Lloyd why he is obsessed with Miss Brodie, pointing out her ridiculousness. Mr. Lloyd concedes that she is ridiculous, but tells Sandy to stoop analyzing his mind, an unnatural habit in a girl of eighteen.

In September, Miss Brodie and Sandy meet at the Braid Hills Hotel, where Miss Brodie discusses Hitler, quite sure that fascism (either Hitlerian or general) will save the world. Sandy is bored. At last Miss Brodie comes to the point: “‘Rose tells me you have become his [Mr. Lloyd’s] lover,’” she says. Sandy says she has, because Mr. Lloyd interests her. Miss Brodie responds that, as a Roman Catholic, Mr. Lloyd can’t think for himself, is all instinct, and therefore not suitable for an insightful person like Sandy.

Mr. Lloyd continues painting accidental portraits of Jean Brodie, even though he recognizes as Sandy does that she is not to be taken seriously. Their affair continues even once Mrs. Lloyd returns with the family, all the more dangerously and excitingly. By the end of the year, however, Sandy has lost interest in Mr. Lloyd the man, but is nonetheless deeply absorbed in his mind. She is especially interested in his Roman Catholic religion, an interest she takes with her even after leaving Mr. Lloyd. Eventually, of course, Sandy becomes a Roman Catholic nun.

The following autumn, Sandy meets Miss Brodie several times, discussing Mr. Lloyd as usual, how his portraits all reflect the lover who renounced him. Miss Brodie tells Sandy that, however strange, it is she, Sandy herself, and not Rose who was destined to be the great lover. Miss Brodie also confides in Sandy that she regrets urging the young Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco; Sandy had not been aware of Miss Brodie’s influence to this effect till that moment.

That autumn, Sandy returns to Blaine to see Miss Mackay, and tells her that Miss Brodie is still cultivating sets of girls at once precocious and out of key with their classmates. Sandy advises Miss Mackay to attempt to unseat Miss Brodie on the grounds of her fascist political interests. Sandy then explains that she is telling all this to Miss Mackay because she wants to put “‘a stop to Miss Brodie.’” When the time comes to force Miss Brodie to retire because of her politics, Miss Mackay does not fail to say to her that it had been a Brodie girl who had betrayed her.

Sandy is to leave Edinburgh at the end of the year. When she goes to the Lloyds’ to say goodbye, she looks around Mr. Lloyd’s studio and sees the portraits “on which she had failed to put a stop to Miss Brodie.” Sandy is “fuming…with Christian morals” at this point.

It is in the end of the summer term of 1939 that Miss Brodie is forced to retire, “on the grounds that she had been teaching Fascism.” Sandy has entered the Catholic Church by then, where she meets a number of fascists “much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.”

Miss Brodie writes to Sandy to tell her of her retirement, theorizing that the political question was only an excuse, and that what Miss Mackay really disapproved of was her educational policy. Miss Brodie is most hurt and amazed to believe that one of her own special girls has betrayed her. She tells Sandy that she could suspect any of her girls of the betrayal save Sandy herself. Sandy replies: “‘If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us.”

Over the years, many Brodie girls contact Sandy after she has become Sister Helena of the Transfiguration and published “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” Jenny writes that Miss Brodie is past her prime and obsessed with the question of who betrayed her. Jenny also visits Sandy, and Sandy tells her, clutching the grille which separates the two women, that Miss Brodie “‘was quite an innocent in her way.’” Monica visits Sandy as well, and reports to her that Miss Brodie at last suspects her, Sandy, of the betrayal. “‘It’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due,’” Sandy says.

And then there is the day that the inquiring young man visits Sandy (an incident first described in Chapter 2), speaking with her through the grille which Sandy “clutched more desperately than ever.” He asks her about her formative influences from her schooldays—literary? political? personal? Calvinism? Sister Helena responds, “‘There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.’”