The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Description

Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving.

First Sentence

THE boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: A Novel (P.S.)PaperbackHarper Perennial Modern Classics2009-02-10
• The prime of Miss Jean BrodieBuccaneer Books1961-01-01
• Die LehrerinDiogenes1962-01-01
• The Prime of Miss Jean BrodiePaperbackReclam, Ditzingen1985-01-01
• The prime of Miss Jean BrodieThe Folio Society1998-01-01
• The prime of Miss Jean BrodiePerennial Classics1999-01-01