I mentioned the other day that it was a coincidence that just when I’d started reading Muriel Spark’s 1961 classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I saw an article about inspirational teachers. Well, doesn’t that just go to show that I had no idea what the novel was really about, and no, I’ve never seen the film either. I don’t know if I was quite expecting a sort of female Mr Chips, but goodness me that certainly isn’t what I got if I was.

I’m sure I’m probably about the only person who didn’t know the story until this week, but the novel follows Miss Jean Brodie, teacher in the traditional Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, as she tries to make her pupils the ‘creme-de-la-creme’. In particular there is ‘the Brodie set’, a group of girls she favours above the others, and who she keeps in close touch with throughout their school career. When she is teaching them in the years before they go to Senior School, she eschews traditional lessons, instead regaling them with stories of her love life, her opinions on art, and reads them Jane Eyre as they learn to sew. Unsurprisingly, the other teachers scorn her, and the headmistress is always looking for a way to force her retirement.

As time goes on, and the girls grow older, it becomes clear that Miss Brodie has specific plans for some of them, plans that would fulfil some of her own desires – especially when it comes to her unfulfilled love affair with Teddy Lloyd the art master. The girls, then, become little more than puppets as Miss Brodie grows increasingly self-obsessed and slightly mad, until one girl – one of her very own set – betrays her to the headmistress and brings about the end of Miss Brodie’s teaching career.

Jean Brodie is genuinely one of the most unlikeable characters I have come across in some time. She is self-obsessed and selfish, arrogant and ruthless. She talks admiringly about Mussolini and his Fascisti, and increasingly admiringly about Germany’s new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler (though she does later concede that he has been “naughty”). She deplores ‘Team Spirit’ if it means that her girls will go against her, but demands and relies upon that same sense of unquestioning loyalty from them towards her. She sees them as her very own Fascisti.  And while she makes a great show about her giving the girls the education she believes valuable, she ultimately deserts (a better word might be betrays) them academically, leaving them to ‘work up’ their subjects in their own time. She does, actually, betray them in many ways, I think, though I can’t articulate those ways here without spoiling more of the story.

This is a short book, but it still took me a few evenings to finish it. It’s a novel that demands close attention, much like Jean Brodie demands herself within the story, and it’s definitely not one to be rushed. Like other great novels, it is as much about what is left unsaid than it is about what is there in black and white on the page. In that sense, then, this is a tremendously powerful novel, which is at turns both very witty and really quite unsettling. I’m very glad to have read it, finally.