Ratings43
Average rating3.6
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
A book that was on many people's recommended reads lists. Jean Brodie is a teacher at a girls' school with a following. She's sharp and well-read and clever, which goes against the grain of the educational institution, but she is also flawed and leads her students onto paths that do not always serve them or the world well. Why is it when we find someone we admire we seem to ignore the parts that don't work for us? A cautionary tale, in a sense, for me.
‰ЫПMiss Brodie‰ЫЄs brown eyes were fixed on the clouds, she looked quite beautiful and frail, and it occurred to Sandy that she had possibly renounced Teddy Lloyd only because she was aware that she could not keep up this beauty; it was a quality in her that came and went.‰Ыќ
Books
7 booksIf you enjoyed this book, then our algorithm says you may also enjoy these.