An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of
Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird)
pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion,
and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose.
Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over
an extended - and interrupted - period (thirty years) during which
Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first
in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal
precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in
loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her
removed. Finally the girls grow up - and Monica, Rose, Eunice,
Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes)
separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death,
marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is
a central focus - who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the
headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In
this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the
projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a
complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and
of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel
Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her
craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest
etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The
New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, freethinking ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - the 'creme de la creme' - who become the Brodie Set, introduced to a privileged world of adult games that they will never forget.
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